Hashim El-Omar – Forefront

Hashim El-Omar, Research Assistant, The University of Sydney.

Hashim is a research assistant in the MIND lab, within the FRONTIER research group. He studied Neuroscience and Psychology in Aberdeen, Scotland and Oklahoma, United States before completing his BSc (Hons) degree at UNSW in 2017, graduating with distinction and a first-class Honours dissertation. He joined the MIND group in 2019. He is involved with both clinical and research aspects of FRONTIER’s activities, engaging in recruitment and cognitive testing of healthy controls and dementia patients for various MIND research projects. These include the neural and behavioural correlates of autobiographical memory impairment, loss of subjective experience of pleasure (anhedonia), mind wandering, and verbal/non-verbal modes of scene and object construction.

Forefront Group: MIND

BMC Memory and Imagination in Neurological Disorders Research Group

Expertise:

Dementia
Semantic and episodic memory
Mind wandering
Anhedonia

Affiliate Organisations

Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney

Neurodegeneration of interest:

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)

Behavioural Frontotemporal dementias (bvFTD)

Primary progressive aphasia

Specific Skills:

Experimental tasks
Cognitive testing
Voxel-based morphometry analysis
Participant recruitment

Key Publications from this project

Ramanan, S., Foxe, D., El-Omar, H., Ahmed, R., Hodges, J., Piguet, O. and Irish, M. (2021). Evidence for a pervasive autobiographical memory impairment in Logopenic Progressive Aphasia. Neurobiology of Aging, 108, pp.168-178.
Shaw, S., El-Omar, H., Ramanan, S., Piguet, O., Ahmed, R., Whitton, A. and Irish, M. (2021). Anhedonia in Semantic Dementia—Exploring Right Hemispheric Contributions to the Loss of Pleasure. Brain Sciences, 11(8), p.998.
Shaw, S., El-Omar, H., Roquet, D., Hodges, J., Piguet, O., Ahmed, R., Whitton, A. and Irish, M. (2021). Uncovering the prevalence and neural substrates of anhedonia in frontotemporal dementia. Brain, 144(5), pp.1551-1564.
Hwang, Y., Strikwerda-Brown, C., El-Omar, H., Ramanan, S., Hodges, J., Burrell, J., Piguet, O. and Irish, M. (2021). “More than words” – Longitudinal linguistic changes in the works of a writer diagnosed with semantic dementia. Neurocase, 27(3), pp.243-252.