Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Clinical Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases
- Infection, Immunity & Inflammation Dept
- UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
- Faculty of Pop Health Sciences
Having completed my medical degree at Imperial College in 2001, I became a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in 2005. As part of an Academic Clinical Fellowship (ACF) I began working in Peru as part of a large collaboration between Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Imperial College, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. During a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship I undertook an MSc in Modern Epidemiology at Imperial College and a PhD in Lima that focussed on the transmission of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. This was followed by a Senior Lecturer position and subsequently an Associate Professorship at University College London. I am also a consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
GRANTS AS PI AND AWARDS
2006 Research Grant £26,000 Sir Halley Stewart Trust
2007 Project Grant £20,000 British Infection Society
2008 Research Grant £2,000 British Research Council
2009 The Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship £450,000
2010 Tuberculosis Investigator Award for MDRTB £1,000 ERS
2015 The Woodruff Medal for PhD LSHTM
2015 The Bill and Melinda Gates Consortium $65,000 TB
2016 The Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Fellowship £450,000 The Genomics of MDRTB
2016 The Academy of Medical Sciences Grant ACL £29,900 TB Genomics
2017 DEANN European Genomics Training Collaboration £6000 Training Grant
2018 ISSF Global Fellowship SR £70,000
2018 British Infection Association Prison Tuberculosis £20,000
2019 Placental Metagenomics Diagnostics £25,000 Biomedical Research Centre UCL
2020 GOSH Charity £92,000 The Co-Stars Study
2020 NIH R01 $2.5M Tuberculosis Transmission and Pathology
The main focus of my research is the diagnosis, transmission and treatment of infectious diseases. Since 2006, I have been working between the UK and Lima, Peru where I have assembled and whole genome sequenced large tuberculosis strain collections. This work has changed tuberculosis practice by improving the genome-based diagnosis of tuberculosis drug resistance. My research group has also led the design and field testing of new drug resistant tuberculosis diagnostics that are capable of being implemented in resource poor settings. This research was supported by a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship and subsequently a Wellcome Trust post-doctoral fellowship. In July 2020, I was awarded as UK Principal Investigator (PI) with a £2.5M US National Institute of Health R01 Grant to study the transmission of infectious diseases together with Professor Robert H Gilman at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2020, as PI, I led the Co-Stars Study, a large prospective cohort study of antibody dynamics and COVID risk factors in >4,000 healthcare workers at Great Ormond Street Hospital.