My research interests are devoted to the role of telomerase in ageing and cancer and under oxidative stress. I focus particularly on non-telomeric and non-canonical roles of telomerase. We and others have found that telomerase shuttles from the nucleus to mitochondria under oxidative stress. My group was the first to describe a protective role of telomerase and its protein part TERT onto mitochondria (Ahmed et al., 2008). We recently found that cancer cells protect themselfs from external stress by mitochondrial localisation of telomerase which decreases nuclear damage and apoptosis and is therefore a pro-survival mechanism (Singhapol et al., 2013). Since adult neurons do not express telomerase activity but still express TERT, the protein part of telomerase, we demonstrated recently that this could protect neurons from oxidative damage and neurodegenerative agents such as hyperphosphorylated tau (Spilsbury et al., 2015). We also used embryonic mouse neurons from telomerase/TERT deficient as well as wild type mice and transduced them with lentiviruses against a mutant (P301L) tau protein and showed more oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation in neurons lacking TERT compared to wild type neurons (Spilsbury et al., 2015). Thus TERT seems to protects neurons against hyperphosphorylated tau protein which induces neurodegeneration in the context of Alzheimer's disease and other tauopaties. We propose that boosting TERT levels in the brain using known telomerase activators could help prevent or ameliorate neurodegenerative diseases and dementia related to it. I have introduced new methods for measuring cognitive properties such as Barnes maze (learning and memory) and locomotor tests for mice in our institute.