Dr David Foxe MAPS
Award for Excellent PhD Thesis in Psychology 

Award type: Science 

David is a clinical neuropsychologist who completed his PhD at the University of Sydney. His thesis comprised five experimental studies which aimed to improve the diagnostic accuracy and clinical care of patients living with rare language dementias, known as primary progressive aphasias (PPA). Specifically, his PhD challenged the nosological characterisation of PPA, with a particular emphasis on identifying clinical features beyond the language disorder, such as cognition, behaviour, and functional capacity.

As part of his PhD, he also created an interactive calculator that can differentiate the PPA variants (or subtypes) based on a patient’s performance profile on a brief and widely used cognitive screening test (the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-III: ACE-III). This calculator is freely available for clinicians and represents a new frontier in using data-driven approaches to screen for younger-onset dementias (Foxe et al. 2022 Brain Communications). David now works as a clinical researcher at the FRONTIER Research Group, University of Sydney, and is building other clinical tools which hope to improve Australian clinical practice of PPA and related disorders