Colm Cunningham is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow & Research Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. His principal research interests lie at the point of intersection between neurodegeneration, inflammation and behaviour and the interaction between systemic and central nervous system inflammation. His laboratory has shown that CNS responses to peripheral insults are exaggerated during chronic neurodegenerative disease and microglial priming appears to play a key role in this. This interaction between peripheral and CNS compartments plays a key role in exacerbations of disease such as episodes of delirium in Alzheimer¹s disease & relapse in Multiple Sclerosis and the Cunningham laboratory is currently exploiting systemic inflammation superimposed upon multiple models of neurodegeneration (ME7 prion disease, p75-saporin cholinergic lesions and APP/PS1 transgenic mice) to investigate inflammation-induced delirium and the exacerbation of dementia pathology.