Dr Helen Murray - NZ CTE Expert and researcher

Dr Helen Murray joins me for a Coppuccino and we work to through a lot of the myths, rumors and facts about CTE. Dr Helen Murray is a research fellow at the Centre for Brain Research. She is co-PI of the Tauopathy Lab with Dr Brigid Ryan and leads the brain injury and dementia research group. She completed her PhD at the University of Auckland with Professor Maurice Curtis in 2017 and a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr Alan Koretsky at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA in 2020 before returning to New Zealand. Her research explores the biological mechanisms that link repetitive head injuries and neurodegeneration. She has specific expertise in the neuropathology of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. Dr Murray studies post-mortem human brain tissue donated to the Neurological Foundation of NZ Human Brain Bank and uses a novel tissue labelling technique called multiplex immunohistochemistry to label up to 100 proteins on a single piece of tissue. This powerful high-content labelling and analysis approach allows different tissue pathologies to be assessed at a single-cell level using just one tissue section. Dr Murray is also a New Zealand representative in Ice Hockey since 2013 and captained the New Zealand Ice Fernz from 2016-2020. Her research on the link between repetitive head injuries and dementia is closely aligned with her experience as an athlete and her expertise in human neuropathology research.