Position:
Wellcome Trust funded Research Training Fellow and Specialist Registrar in Neurosurgery
Biography:
- I am a neurosurgical registrar having completed 4 years of specialist training at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. I have been working as a doctor for the past seven years and now taking time out of programme to pursue my academic goals via a lab-based PhD.
- I have had a strong academic interest throughout the course of my training and I believe that this, in combination with clinical acumen, is essential towards not only developing new therapies, but also delivering state of the art treatment and care to patients.
- The area that I am looking to develop is within the field of regenerative medicine and in particular the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) to treat neurodegenerative conditions including Parkinson’s disease.
- I was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship to do my PhD with Dr Kunath and Prof Chandran at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine
- Dr Tilo Kunath’s team has developed human iPSC lines and robust differentiation protocols to make transplantable midbrain dopaminergic neurons. My work with Dr Kunath and Prof Siddharthan Chandran will centre on investigating and mitigating disease spread from host-to-graft in a rat model of Parkinson's.
- If successful, my research will improve the efficacy and safety of future cell-based therapies for Parkinson's patients. I would combine this experience with a fellowship in functional neurosurgery later in my career so that I would be in a position to perform such stem cell-based transplants for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
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