Dr. Phuah completed her preclinical and clinical training at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and received an MMSc in Clinical and Translational Investigation from Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency and fellowship in Neurology and Neurocritical Care, respectively, at Harvard Medical School (a combined program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital). She then completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship in analytical and functional genomics at the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine/Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. She joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis in 2016. She is also a clinical neurointensivist in the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Neurological and Neurosurgical Intensive Care Unit.
Dr. Phuah has a broad research background including training and expertise in systems neuroscience, neuroimmunology, neurogenetics, and quantitative neuroimaging. As a clinician-scientist, she seeks to identify strategies and targets for mitigating vascular brain injury. Dr. Phuah’s research focuses on understanding the biological mechanisms driving the development of acute and chronic cerebrovascular injury, specifically the role of cerebral small vessel disease in cognitive impairment, neurodegeneration, and stroke. She is currently spearheading research efforts aimed at investigating the genetic and environmental determinants of white matter hyperintensities, an MRI-marker of brain aging, and cerebral small vessel disease by applying big data analytic approaches to large-scale, multi-modal genomic, and neuroimaging data.