Marty is a PhD student working in the Complex Disease Epigenomics Group under the supervision of Dr. Emma Dempster. He is working on project aiming to develop a novel genomic biomarker of neurodegenerative diseases. The primary aims of the project are to develop a sequencing-based assay that can detect cfDNA originating from brain cells in human blood plasma samples and to validate the ability of this assay to detect signs of neuronal loss using samples from neurodegenerative disease patients at the earliest stages of disease progression.