Listen to this extensive interview with Professor Áine Kelly, a physiologist at Trinity College Dublin, as she makes the case for exercise as a powerful and accessible form of preventative medicine for age-related brain diseases. The discussion travels beyond mouse research in the lab and into the modern life. We explore how urban city design affects our movement, as well as why staying intellectually curious and socially connected is just as important for healthy brain ageing as physical movement itself. Finally, Professor Áine dismantles the guilt many of us carry about “not exercising enough” and reveals the secret best exercise to keep the brain young.

“There was never really a master plan,” reflects Professor Kelly on her scientific career journey. “At heart and soul, I’m a physiologist.” Undergraduate studies in physiology at Trinity led her into a neuroscience-based final year project with Professor Marina Lynch, “at a time when there wasn’t even a neuroscience degree,” she recalls. Early research on long-term potentiation and synaptic plasticity evolved into a postdoctoral position at Paris-Saclay University, focused on memory consolidation and inflammation.

Returning to Trinity as a lecturer, Professor Áine “was interested in exercise only because it induced BDNF, a neurotrophic growth factor, found to carry beneficial health properties for the brain” she explains. “But the more I studied it, the more fascinated I became by exercise itself and how it connects the cardiovascular system, the brain, and the body.” Today, Professor Áine’s work is brought full circle: a union between physiology and neuroscience, exploring how movement protects brain health throughout ageing by preventing inflammation and cognitive decline.

Interview with neuroscientist Dr Dirk Sieger, whose research focuses on the role of macrophages and microglia in brain tumour growth coming soon!

Interview with Marino Pagan from Edinburgh Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences on interconnection between the functionality of our brains and mechanism of artificial intelligence coming soon!