CoL Centre 2020 Students

I obtained my BSc. in Biomedical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London, followed by an MSc. in Immunology at Imperial College London. I had then decided to work in industry for two years, which allowed me to develop a strong interest in cancer immunotherapies through working on bispecific antibodies for immuno-oncology use.

My PhD research will be focused on image-guided targeting of Neuroblastoma. There will be a focus on using preclinical disease models, and syngeneic tumour models to understand how radiotherapy may impact T cells in penetrating the tumour core.

I obtained my BSc in Bioscience with Biomedical Sciences in Aberdeen. During my honours project in Massimiliano Mazzone’s lab at VIB KU Leuven, where my research was focused on Treg metabolism, I developed a strong interest in cancer biology.

During my PhD, I will be based at the UCL Cancer Institute and Medical Physics and Bioengineering Department, led by Maria Hawkins, my primary supervisor and Ivana Bjedov as my secondary supervisor. My doctoral research is trying to establish universality of rapamycin mediated radioprotection/mitigation in different cancers and stages of disease, as well as to explore the role of senescence in both normal tissue and tumour resistance to radiation. Additionally, I am evaluating rapamycin’s effect on genome stability upon irradiation, which will help to further elucidate the rapamycin-mediated radioprotection mechanism from mutation signature analyses.

I am a PhD student on the CRUK City of London Centre RadNet 2020 programme and my research is trying to enhance sensitisation to radiotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer. I am investing the mechanisms of resistance to radiotherapy treatment within the tumour microenvironment, with focus on angiocrine signalling. During my PhD, I will be based between labs at the Francis Crick Institute and the Barts Cancer Institute (BCI), Queen Mary University of London. I am excited to be leading the collaboration between my primary supervisor, Prof Kairbaan Hodivala-Dilke (BCI) who researches angiogenesis in the tumour microenvironment and my secondary supervisor, Dr Simon Boulton (Crick) investigating DNA damage/repair in cancer and its treatments.

I obtained my BSc in Medical Sciences from the University of Exeter Medical School in 2019, where I developed a strong interest in Neuroscience and Cancer. In my third year I took an optional placement year abroad in Boston, where I was a Harvard student intern at Massachusetts General Hospital working in a lab researching Schwannomatosis and Neurofibromatosis, both tumour predisposition syndromes. It was my PI, Dr James Walker, who really inspired me to pursue a career in scientific research, showing me how collaborative, reactive and creative working in a lab could be. In the final year of my BSc, I completed a project looking at the interactions between normal and cancer cells in the early tumour microenvironment and really enjoyed working in cell culture again and designing my own experiments.

After graduating from Exeter, I started my MSc at the Institute of Child Health, UCL in Personalised Medicine and Novel Therapies. I have really enjoyed improving my bioinformatics skills and understanding more about the role of multi-omics in disease and medicine. My MSc thesis looked at the pathological role of autophagy in brittle bone disease and in the mechanisms of treatment with mesenchymal stem cells, through analysis of the transcriptomic changes in osteoblasts.

I am a PhD student on the City of London RadNet Program based between St Thomas’s Hospital (King’s College London, KCL) and the University College London Cancer Centre (UCL). During my PhD I will be working under the supervision of Dr Samantha Terry (KCL) and Dr Tammy Kalber (UCL) to examine combinations of precision radiotherapy with immunotherapy for the treatment of head and neck cancers. As irradiation has been shown to upregulate PD-L1 expression in the tumour microenvironment, specifically on dendritic cells, macrophages and tumour cells, my project will focus on examining combinations of radiotherapy with anti-PD-L1 based immunotherapies.

I hold an MSci in Biological Sciences with a years Professional Placement from the University of Birmingham. During my placement year I worked at AstraZeneca on their mTOR and PI3K inhibitor immunooncology projects, sparking my interest in the immune system and cancer. From there I returned to University to work in Professor Martin Hewisons lab for my master’s project, examining the effect of vitamin D on CD4+ T cells. Since graduating I have worked for Artios Pharma, a Biotech specialising in DNA Damage Response therapies, where I contributed to many of their pre-clinical projects.

I am excited to be part of the CoL RadNet Program and look forward to taking part in all it has to offer.

I am a MB-PhD student in the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. My research is focused on exploring the immune microenvironment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in relation to immune-oncology (IO) therapy response. With imaging technologies and data from the TRACERx cohort study, I hope to characterise the spatial context of immune cells at the single cell level. This would enable us to better understand why IO therapies vary in efficacy in different patients and ultimately predict successful response to IO therapy in patients with NSCLC. Prior to starting my PhD, I was part way through my medical training at UCL Medical School and have completed an intercalated degree in Mathematics, Computers and Medicine.

I am a clinical research fellow in Jessica Okosun’s lab at the Barts Cancer Institute. I completed a degree in biochemistry before studying medicine as a postgraduate student. I am currently completing my specialist training in haematology at University College Hospital. My research interest is in primary CNS lymphoma (PCNSL) which is sub type of lymphoma with a poor prognosis. There is an unmet need to identify biomarkers of predictive and prognostic value and to better understand the links between molecular phenotypes and clinical behaviour in these tumours.

My project has 3 key aims:

1. Determine the molecular profiles of good- and poor-risk PCNSL
2. Assess if tumour-specific mutations can be tracked in peripheral blood and cerebrospinal fluid
3. Spatially map the immune microenvironment of PCNSL tumours

I am a Clinical Research Training Fellow in Dr Mariam Jamal-Hanjani’s group based at the UCL Cancer Institute. My research integrates tumour genomics with the tumour microenvironment in order to study mechanisms of resistance to immunotherapy in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). I am particularly interested in how these mechanisms evolve through treatment and from early to late stage disease.

I am a Medical Oncology trainee and I have previously held NIHR academic foundation and clinical fellowships. Prior to my clinical training I completed a Masters of Research at Kings College London.

I am a ST5 Histopathology trainee in Glasgow with an interest in sarcoma. I initially studied for a BSc (Hons) in Molecular Medicine at Sussex University before studying Medicine at Cambridge University. I am now a clinical research fellow in the Sarcoma Biology and Genomics lab at the UCL Cancer Institute. My primary supervisor is Dr Nischalan Pillay (UCL Cancer Institute) and my secondary supervisor is Dr Peter Van Loo (The Francis Crick Institute). My research will be exploring the various mechanisms of radiotherapy resistance in soft tissue sarcoma. I hope to use this fellowship as an opportunity to become a clinician scientist to combine a diagnostic and research career.