The NIHR Leicester BRC is pleased to announce 4 new early career fellows have been appointed to work alongside the precision medicine theme, thanks to the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund at the University of Leicester (Leicester WTISSF).
Chiara Batini
With a background in human evolutionary genetics, over the past ten years Chiara has been focusing on the role of culture, sex-biased behaviours and climate in shaping the evolution of human populations in sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Chiara will now expand her research interests to phenotypes of clinical relevance and genetic epidemiology approaches. In this context, during the awarded Leicester-Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellowship, Chiara will be studying the genetic architecture of smoking behaviour in individuals of European, African and Asian ancestries using UK Biobank data.
Claire Lawson
Claire is a clinical epidemiologist, lecturer and cardiology nurse. Her NIHR doctoral fellowship focused on the use of ‘big data’ to investigate the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease, heart failure, comorbidity and patient-centred outcomes in primary care and hospital-based settings. She is interested in statistical modelling of longitudinal data with time-varying exposures as well as health informatics. Claire will now be extending this work as a Leicester-Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellow to investigate cardiovascular risk factor trends and aetiological mechanisms in BME groups leading to Heart Failure.
Ranjit Arnold
Ranjit is a post-doctoral research fellow and Cardiologist. He completed his clinical training in Cardiology in Oxford and a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine in the University of Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research. His primary interest is in the application of cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease and the evaluation of its therapy. He is extending this work as a Leicester-Wellcome Trust ISSF Fellow, investigating the potential role of CMR perfusion imaging in diagnosing and risk stratifying patients with suspected coronary disease.
Josh Vande Hey
Joshua completed a PhD in optical engineering of atmospheric sensors at Loughborough University in 2013. Since coming to Leicester that year, he has gradually moved from optics and sensor engineering to working with environmental and health data. Alongside his Leicester Wellcome ISSF Interdisciplinary research fellowship on health effects of short term variations in weather and air pollution, he holds a NERC knowledge exchange fellowship entitled Aerosol Science for Public Health and Public Policy through Commercial Avenues. He is currently collaborating with the University of Nairobi to develop air pollution monitoring, health impact assessment and mitigation strategies in Kenya, with Cerner UK, Ltd on the Environmental Population Health Informatics pilot project, and with the ALSPAC cohort on the NERC-MRC ERICA project on environmental resources for cohort studies.
Explanatory Notes
The Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund enables universities in the UK and Ireland to invest in areas that are of mutual strategic importance to Wellcome and the individual institutions. These are within and across medical and clinical sciences, public health, social sciences and medical humanities.