Short Biography
I am a Cancer Research UK PhD student in the laboratory of John R. Griffiths at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute (CRI), and the Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge. At the CRI, I am employing experimental magnetic resonance techniques to measure the pH in solid tumours as a tool to study the metabolism of human cancers.
Before I started my PhD, I completed my pre-clinical medical training at the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College B.A. 2007, M.A. 2011), where I also spent one year as a Part II Natural Sciences Tripos student in the Department of Pharmacology. After Christ’s, I continued my clinical medical training in London at Barts & The London School of Medicine. After a year in London, I returned to Cambridge to take up a PhD position at the CRI and joined the Cambridge MB/PhD programme as a visiting clinical medical student.
During my undergraduate medical years, I gained experience working in various different fields of biomedical research. In the summer of my first year at medical school, I was a UROP student at Imperial College London’s Department of Bioengineering, working with Colin G. Caro on the fluid mechanics of the cardiovascular system and atherosclerosis.
Then, in the summer of 2006, I travelled to Boston, Massachusetts to join George L. King’s lab at the Harvard-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center. There, I maintained my interest in cardiovascular diseases but approached the problem from the perspectives of metabolism, immunology and cell signalling. As a visiting student in George’s lab, I worked with Christian Rask-Madsen, where we studied the insulin signalling pathway (InsR-IRS1/2-PI3K-Akt pathway) to identify cytokines involved in blood monocyte chemoattraction during the pathogenesis of diabetic atherosclerosis. The results of my work served as a basis for further work done by Christian and others after I left George’s lab. His work ultimately demonstrated that loss of insulin signalling in vascular endothelial cells accelerates atherosclerosis in Apo E null mice. This work was published in 2010 in the journal Cell Metabolism. Read more about it here and here.
To know more about my current research work, please visit my Cambridge Cancer Centre researcher profile, and the general research interest of the Griffiths Lab at the CRI.
