Our Clinical Research Training Fellows for 2023/24 have now been appointed. Seven healthcare professionals from a range of different disciplines and backgrounds will be undertaking PhD training and delivering innovative research to help improve the health of people living in East London.
Find out more and make an application
Our Healthcare Professional Clinical Research Training Fellowship Scheme is open to all healthcare professionals. Our fellowship offers up to three years of full-time salary support, as well as PhD fees and research costs.
Our successful Fellows for this year are:
Uttara Kurup
Uttara is a Neonatologist and Paediatrician, currently based at Watford General Hospital, who will be moving to Queen Mary University of London to undertake her PhD. She will be conducting research into Silver-Russell Syndrome, a condition associated with slow growth before and after birth, which affects many systems of the body. Her research will focus on a mutation in a gene called HMGA2 and aims to provide a better understanding of this rare condition and the role of genetic changes in causing the condition.
Ross Thomson
Ross is a Cardiologist based at the Barts Heart Centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, with a particular interest in echocardiography and heart failure. As part of his fellowship, Ross plans to develop research into cardiogenic shock, identifying the different processes underlying the disease and what impact this has on treatment provision. He will perform sophisticated heart scans to assess the function of the heart, to better understand individuals responses to treatment.
Eileen Kelly
Eileen works as a Speech and Language Therapist at The Royal London Hospital. She specialises in working with adults who have developed problems with swallowing due to serious illness. During her PhD she will be exploring a possible treatment for muscle wasting in patients, called neuromuscular electrical stimulation. If the treatment is viable, it will help to improve a key functional barrier to recovery from critical illness.
Dorina-Gabriela Condurache
Dorina is a Cardiologist based at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. In 2022, she became a Junior Research Fellow at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, specialising in cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging and medical statistics. She will be conducting research into the long-term health effects in patients who have undergone a bone marrow transplant, with the aim of improving longer-term health outcomes, and further refining prevention and treatment strategies.
James Perera
James is a Rheumatologist, based at the Centre for Experimental Medicine and Rheumatology at the William Harvey Research Institute. During his PhD, James aims to improve the outcomes of patients with seronegative rheumatoid arthritis, a type of arthritis where the presence of antibodies in the blood that would normally indicate that a person has rheumatoid arthritis are absent. This makes it harder to diagnose rheumatoid arthritis in these patients. James ultimately hopes to improve the precision of diagnosis and subsequent treatments.
Elen Williams
Elen Williams is a General Practitioner working within the borough of Tower Hamlets. She is also currently the co-lead of a City, University of London project, working within the Bromley-by-Bow community to provide better healthcare access to people with severe mental illness. Her fellowship aims to improve the identification and treatment of long-term pain in people with severe mental illness and will focus primarily on the local Tower Hamlets population, which has one of the highest early death rates for people with severe mental illness in London.
Catherine Hilton
Catherine works as a Physiotherapist at The Royal London Hospital, specialising in trauma and orthopaedic research. As part of her fellowship, Catherine will be exploring the suitability of rehabilitation support offered to patients with badly broken leg bones and will explore the barriers to patients being able to receive treatment and the effectiveness of this treatment on recovery. Her ultimate aim is to translate her research results into clinical practice.