Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
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- Glaxo-Wellcome Professor of Developmental Neurobiology
- Developmental Biology & Cancer Dept
- UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
- Faculty of Pop Health Sciences
I began
my career as a scientist with a BA in Zoology and a DPhil in experimental
embryology from Oxford University. I saw how my scientific training could
be clinically relevant to healthcare, but I needed to gain a deeper
understanding of health problems. Hence, after my DPhil, I applied for medical
training at Guy’s Hospital, London. At this time, my plans could be summarised
as:
“The
challenge of birth defects had been largely approached from a clinical
perspective. We know little of the processes in the embryo and fetus that cause
disabling childhood disorders. My aim was to use the embryology knowledge I had gained, together with clinical training, to make inroads into the questions of
pathogenesis and prevention of congenital malformations”.
Throughout
my clinical course, I moonlighted in research within the Paediatric Research
Unit at Guy’s Hospital. I began working on a mouse model of spina bifida, which
I am still studying today! I found the period of medical training both
varied and stimulating, as I moved seamlessly between learning how to manage
patients on the ward and studying mouse embryos that failed to close their
neural tube in the lab.
After
graduating in medicine, I completed my house officer jobs at Guy’s and Newcross
Hospitals, and then returned to full-time academic research. I went to the
Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University, USA where I gained valuable
postdoctoral experience. Then, I returned to UK and ran a small team at
the Imperial Cancer Research Fund’s Developmental Biology Unit,
University of Oxford. I moved to the Institute of Child Health in 1992,
initially as Senior Lecturer and from 1996 as Professor of Developmental
Neurobiology. I became Institute Director in 2003 and stepped down from
this role in September 2012.
I head
the Newlife Birth Defects Research Centre, which opened in 2012. This
Centre comprises a critical research mass of scientists and clinicians studying
the causes and developmental mechanisms underlying congenital disorders in
children. As part of this effort, my own team is working to understand the
genetic basis of spina bifida, to unravel the events in the embryo that
underlie this disorder, and to pursue new therapies that may enter clinical
practice in the coming years.
I am co-Director of the Human Developmental Biology Resource
(HDBR), a biobank that collects and supplies human embryonic and fetal material
for research in developmental disorders (www.hdbr.org). Funded by MRC and
Wellcome for the last 20 years, the HDBR supplies material to over 100 research
projects at any time, and is currently the world’s leading human fetal tissue biobank.
My research is concerned with the embryonic mechanisms
underlying central nervous system development and congenital disorders. The
laboratory is known internationally for its expertise in animal models of birth
defects, particularly neural tube defects (e.g. spina bifida). It is the first
lab to take a potential new therapy for a birth defect, worked out in mouse
models (i.e. inositol for prevention of folic acid-resistant neural tube
defects), and to apply it to human pregnancy through a pilot clinical trial,
the PONTI study (Br J Nutr, 2016, 115, 974-83).
A positive outcome of a full-scale trial would be the first innovation
in primary prevention of a significant human birth defect since the research on
folic acid in the late 1980s. My research team is supported by funding from the
Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, SPARKS (Sport Aiding Medical Research
in Kids), Newlife Foundation for Disabled Children and the Bo Hjelt Spina
Bifida Foundation.
Research student supervision at PhD level, together with
supervision of laboratory and library projects for MSc and BSc students at UCL
and beyond.
Lectures on normal and abnormal development of the CNS, introduction to birth
defects, introduction to developmental biology, and writing Scientific English,
on:
1983 | Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery | University of London | |
1979 | Bachelor of Medicine | University of Oxford | |
1978 | Doctor of Philosophy | University of Oxford | |
1975 | Bachelor of Arts (Honours) | University of Oxford |