Cindy completed her B.AnVetBioSc (Hon I) at the University of Sydney. She then earned her PhD in the Gene Therapy Research Unit at Children’s Medical Research Institute, where she worked to develop liver targeted therapies with adeno-associated viral vectors (AAV).
Cindy then obtained funding from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Asia Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver (APASL) and the Endeavour Postdoctoral Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral training in Japan. She worked at the University of Tokyo and the National Center for Global Health and Medicine, using AAVs to study the role of stem cells in liver regeneration.
Cindy returned to Australia as a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Heart Research at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research. In this role, she used lentiviral and AAV vectors to develop therapies to protect the heart against cancer drug cardiotoxicity.
She then joined Neuroscience Research Australia, to undertake research in developing therapies for Parkinson’s Disease, using stem cell derived brain cells as the disease model.
Since joining Translational Vectorology Research Unit in 2024, Cindy is working to develop a viral vector based gene therapy for Parkinson’s Disease.