Heidi Lai

I am a Research Fellow and RDS General Adviser at Imperial College London. As an adviser, I support investigators who are submitting applications for peer-reviewed funding, including NIHR, MRC, charities and others. As a research fellow, I focus on elucidating trajectories of cardiometabolic risk factors and their associations with dementia among type 2 diabetes patients using data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink. I received postdoctoral training in Nutritional Epidemiology at Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy (USA), specialising in longitudinal survival analyses assessing associations between serial fatty acid biomarkers, healthy ageing, and cardiometabolic diseases. Prior to this, I completed my PhD in Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds, where I examined associations between polyphenol-rich foods and cardiovascular disease in UK populations.