Caroline Williams-Gray, PhD, completed her undergraduate medical training at Cambridge University and Oxford Clinical School, UK, and received her PhD from Cambridge in 2008. In 2013, she became a principal investigator at the John Van Geest Centre for Brain Repair in Cambridge. Recently, she was awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinician Scientist Fellowship.

Dr. Williams-Gray studies why clinical manifestations of Parkinson's disease (PD), such as symptoms and the pace of disease progression, vary on an individual basis. Her ultimate goal is to develop more targeted therapeutic strategies for different PD subtypes. Using epidemiological, imaging and genetic approaches, she has defined and characterized distinct cognitive syndromes, subtypes of Parkinson's defined based on changes in cognition (thinking), and developed tools for predicting the risk of dementia and poor outcome in these people. She and her group are now investigating the role of the immune system in the diversity of outcomes in PD. In these studies, she employs imaging techniques and analyzes tissue samples and immune cells donated by people with Parkinson's disease.