Dr Nicole Kochan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), University of NSW and a Clinical Neuropsychologist. She is the Principal Investigator of the NHMRC funded CogSCAN project, Leader of the Neuropsychology streams of two large population studies of cognitive health and neurodegeneration– the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study and the Sydney Centenarian Study, and is a core member of CHeBA’s international consortia of cohort studies of ageing - COSMIC, STROKOG and ICC-Dementia. She is the Neuropsychologist on the research teams of three large randomised control intervention trials in cognitive ageing and Mild Cognitive Impairment– Maintain Your Brain; BRAIN training: Balance, Resistance or Interval training in Mild Cognitive Impairment; MetMemory: Preventing cognitive decline with Metformin.

Nicole's background is in Clinical Neuropsychology with a particular interest in cognitive ageing, decline and dementia. She completed a Masters in Clinical Neuropsychology at Macquarie University in 1998 and a PhD in the School of Psychiatry in 2011 examining the utility of functional MRI in older persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment. She was the recipient of an NHMRC Early Career Research Fellowship (2012-2016).

Her research interests include investigating methods to improve early detection of cognitive decline and dementia using traditional psychometric measures, sensitive normative data and new innovations in computerised cognitive testing. She is also interested in identifying determinants of inter-variability amongst elders, specifically, the risk and protective factors that contribute to different cognitive trajectories over the course of the lifespan, as well as associations of intra-individual variability (IIV) in cognitive performance (moment-to-moment fluctuations on a reaction time task) with future dementia risk and mortality.

Meet Our Researcher
Click here to read Dr Nicole Kochan's ‘Meet Our Researcher’ interview