Ashleigh Lake

Ashleigh Lake is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Childhood Dementia Research Group within the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University. Her research is focused on the biological mechanisms underpinning neurodegeneration in childhood dementia, with particular attention to lysosomal storage diseases and related inflammatory processes in the brain.

Her PhD work centres on lipid dysregulation, especially sphingolipid metabolism, as a contributor to neurological dysfunction. Using liquid chromatography-electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry (LC‑ESI‑MS/MS), she applied targeted and quantitative lipidomic approaches to investigate metabolic pathways relevant to disease pathogenesis. This work clarified compensatory metabolic processes and alterations in sphingolipid synthesis in different Gaucher disease cell models, identifying a novel mechanism of disease (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymgme.2025.109139). Within her PhD, she also synthesised a systematic review of the existing evidence of sphingolipid alterations in Gaucher disease (https://doi.org/10.1186/s13023-025-04015-5), identifying clear gaps in the understanding of how different cells and tissues respond to sphingolipid dysregulation.

Current research explores potential therapeutic avenues in preclinical models of childhood dementia, integrating biochemical and molecular disease data to better understand mechanisms that may be amenable to intervention. This research is driven by the critical need to better understand the disease mechanisms of childhood dementia, a devastating group of >140 different disorders, of which >70% remain untreatable.