Affiliation: King’s College London
Keywords: Spinal cord injury, Regeneration, Respiratory physiology, Neuroscience, Plasticity, Neurodegeneration
Full profile:
27 million people world-wide have lived experience of a spinal cord injury, for which there is currently no cure. My pre-clinical and translational research aims to understand the mechanisms behind these physiological deficits and develop treatment strategies with the aims of restoring ‘normal’ breathing in clinical patients.
During my BSc at Imperial College London (UK), I worked at Eli Lilly (UK) as an electrophysiologist assessing the causes, and pharmaceutical treatments, of temporal lobe epilepsy. I became immersed in spinal cord injury research in 2006 during my PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK) where I helped assess viral therapeutics for this devastating disorder, a treatment which is now being developed for first-in-human trials. During my six years at Case Western Reserve University (USA) and the University of Leeds (UK), I gained additional expertise in respiratory and muscle physiology while focusing on the recovery of critical motor system function at chronic time points following injury. I joined King’s College London (UK) in 2018 as a King’s Prize Fellow where I forged my independent research group focusing on understanding the mechanisms of deficit and recovery throughout the spinal-motor-axis after spinal cord injury. This was shortly followed by a Wellcome Trust & Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship that started in December 2021. Within the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), I am also a Senior Lecturer, co-leading Stem Cell and Spinal Cord Injury MSc programmes and lecturing across BSc and MSc courses.
My lab is based in the Wolfson Centre of the IoPPN. I use a vast array of state-of-the-art approaches including respiratory and muscle physiology, X-ray videography, anatomy, neuroimaging, chemogenetics, pharmacogenetics, and neuromodulation to understand the systemic problems caused by traumatic injury to the central nervous system and subsequent targets for treatment strategies.