I am truly honoured and grateful to receive this fellowship. Visual snow syndrome is common and can be profoundly disabling, yet patients currently have no targeted treatment options. By understanding the brain mechanisms driving the condition, I hope to lay the foundation for therapies that can make a real difference to patients’ lives.
Dr Francesca Puledda, Senior Clinical Research Fellow
01 September 2025
Dr Francesca Puledda awarded MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship
The award will enable Dr Puledda to investigate visual snow syndrome and its underlying neural mechanisms.
Dr Francesca Puledda, Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Wolfson Sensory, Pain and Regeneration Centre and neurologist at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, has been awarded the Medical Research Council's Clinician Scientist Fellowship, which supports outstanding doctors and researchers who are developing independent research programs with the potential to transform patient care.
This highly competitive fellowship will help Dr Puledda investigate visual snow syndrome (VSS), a disabling neurological condition that causes people to see continuous static or ‘snow’ across their field of vision.
Although increasingly recognized, VSS remains poorly understood and currently has no effective treatments. Dr Puledda’s research will provide much-needed insights into the underlying brain mechanisms of the condition and help distinguish it from migraine, which often occurs alongside visual snow.
Her five-year programme, starting in November 2025, will use cutting-edge brain imaging and neurophysiology techniques never before applied to VSS. This includes 7-Tesla Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, the most powerful MRI technology available for human research, to study how visual brain networks function both at rest and during stimulation.
Alongside this, she will apply advanced neurophysiology and neuropharmacology methods to measure brain activity at the level of cortex, and test the effects of medications that influence their signalling. Together, these approaches will create a new translational model of visual snow, offering an unprecedented window into the disorder.
In the longer term, this research will not only improve outcomes for people with VSS, but also advance our understanding of abnormal sensory processing in the brain, with implications for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders.
In the past ten years Dr Puledda has written some of the most cited studies on visual snow syndrome and was awarded the prestigious Professor Anthony Mellows Medal which carried with it the Professor Anthony Mellows Fellowship, one of the King’s Prize Fellowships.
Her work in bringing Visual Snow Syndrome to the fore has been enabled by the generous philanthropic support of the Anthony and Elizabeth Mellows Charitable Settlement and Sierra Domb, Founder of the Visual Snow Initiative.