Abbey Figliomeni is a current PhD candidate based at Perron Institute and The University of Western Australia. Her project aims to investigate how gut and blood metabolomic signatures in people with Parkinson's disease relate to immune cell dysfunction to help further elucidate mechanism of 'gut-blood-brain axis' pathogenesis.

In 2019, Abbey completed her Bachelor's degree with a double-major in Biomedical Science and Clinical Laboratory Science at Murdoch University (Australia), for which she received the university medal for being among the top ten performing graduating students across all disciplines. In 2020, she was awarded First-Class Honours for her project entitled "The use of chronic restraint stress in rodents to evaluate neurometabolite and hippocampal volume changes in depression, and how these are altered by accelerated low-intensity rTMS". 

Throughout her studies, Abbey has gained expertise in a broad range of laboratory techniques, including MRI, 1H-NMR, high-parameter flow cytometry, histology, and cell culture. She is experienced in using coding-based (R, Python) platforms for both univariate and multivariate data modelling and analysis.

She is passionate about the fields of bioinformatics, immunology, microbiology, and neuroscience, with a particular interest in how the intersection of these disciplines can further the understanding of pathologies with signatures of microbial dysbiosis.