Alex Dickens
Alex Dickens is a Finnish Academy Fellow and leads the Neurometabolomics Group at the Turku Bioscience Centre, University of Turku. He also heads the Turku Centre for Chemical and Molecular Analytics (CCMA) within the Department of Chemistry, and is Co-Principal Investigator and co-founder of the Turku Metabolomics Centre, alongside Matej Orešič. He earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2013, where he applied NMR-based metabolomics to predict various brain diseases from blood samples. Following this, he undertook two postdoctoral research positions: first at the Turku PET Centre, investigating novel tracers for neuroinflammation; and subsequently at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he discovered a new mechanism by which the brain communicates with the periphery via extracellular vesicles. During this time, he also developed new mass spectrometry (MS)-based lipidomic methods. He later joined the Orešič group in Turku as a postdoctoral researcher and senior scientist. Alex currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Nordic Metabolomics Society. His research group focuses on developing advanced MS-based methods to detect a broad spectrum of metabolites, applying these techniques to study metabolic changes following brain injury or during brain development. This includes integrating traditional MS-based imaging with other modalities such as MS imaging and PET imaging, to spatially contextualise metabolic changes in the brain. A particular focus of the group is on the role of the endocannabinoid system as a long-range signalling mechanism between the brain and the periphery.