I currently hold a MRC Clinician Scientist award enabling me to investigate the roles of clock proteins in respiratory disease. I also work one day a week at UHSM as a lung transplant consultant.

I trained in medicine and physiology at University College London. During this time I secured a Wellcome vacation scholarship investigating whether proteinuria could be a sensitive marker of renal dysfunction after cardiac surgery. My research in chronobiology was stimulated after securing a MRC clinical research training fellowship in 2007. In 2010 I was named as the British Thoracic Society's young investigator of the year. After my MRC fellowship I was fortunate enough to secure an academic clinical lectureship allowing me to complete my clinical training whilst continuing my research. In 2013 I left for Toronto to train in lung transplantation. After securing a MRC clinician scientist award in 2014 I returned to Manchester to continue my research into how circadian rhythyms can alter lung disease.

Respiratory disease kills approximately 1 in 5 people in the U.K. To reduce this significant burden it is vital to gain a better understanding of respiratory pathophysiology. A novel mechanism governing the lung’s response to noxious stimuli is a collection of proteins, termed the circadian clock. These proteins oscillate over a 24 hour period gating the lungs response to stimuli according to time of day. Up to 10% of the transcriptome is thought to be under this temporal control, however the relevance to pulmonary pathophysiology is poorly understood. So far my research has focused on the clock in one important pulmonary immune cell, the alveolar macrophage. We have described how this immune cell is influenced by the circadian clock whilst showing that targeting the clock protein REVERBalpha with novel ligands alters secretion of powerful messengers (cytokines). We now plan to investigate how disruption of the pulmonary clock causes disease and whether targeting key clock proteins could be a tractable therapeutic target.

Professor David Ray, Professor Stuart farrow, Professor Andrew Loudon

Professor Nizar Yonan, Dr. James Fildes

Professor Andrew Fisher

Dr. Boris Hinz

Member of the Royal College of Physicians,

British Thoracic Society

European Respiratory Society

American Thoracic Society

Endocrine Society

Royal Society of Medicine

BSc. (1st Basic Medical Sciences with Physiology)  (University College London)

MBBS (University College London)

MRCP (Royal College of Physicians)

PhD (Manchester University)