Rate My Professor Anya Topiwala

Anya Topiwala is a Senior Clinical Researcher at the University of Oxford, holding positions in the Department of Psychiatry and the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the Big Data Institute. She is also Principal Investigator, Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Yale University. Topiwala studied clinical medicine at the University of Oxford and completed specialist training in psychiatry with a focus on old age psychiatry. She sees patients with memory problems in her clinical role. She earned her DPhil from Oxford in 2017 in the Department of Psychiatry and joined the Big Data Institute in 2019 supported by a Wellcome fellowship.

Her research examines the impact of and resilience factors on psychiatric and cognitive disorders of later life, employing neuroimaging, genetically informed methods, and clinical data. Her work has advanced understanding of alcohol consumption and brain health, including associations between even moderate alcohol intake and biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, links to higher brain iron levels, and accelerated biological aging. Key publications include studies from 2017 in the BMJ on moderate alcohol as a risk factor for adverse brain outcomes, 2021 and 2022 papers in PLoS Medicine and Molecular Psychiatry on alcohol, brain iron, and telomere length, and a 2026 paper in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine on alcohol use and dementia risk. Awards include the 2026 Society for the Study of Addiction Impact Prize and Wellcome Career Development Awards spanning 2019–2024 and 2024–2032.