We’re delighted to announce our new Clinical Research Training Fellows for 2024/25. This year, we are supporting seven healthcare professionals to undertake PhD training that will help to transform care for the people of East London.
Our Healthcare Professional Clinical Research Training Fellowship (HCRTF) scheme is open to all healthcare professionals who want to make a difference to East London health, through innovative research. We offer up to three years of full-time salary support, as well as PhD fees and research costs.
Find out more and make an application
Meet our successful fellows for this year and learn more about the research that they will be doing.
Sonay Beyatli
Sonay is a respiratory specialty registrar and academic clinical fellow at the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London under the Respiratory Medicine, East London Deanery training programme. Her research will focus on understanding the role of autoantibodies in airway inflammation in severe asthma, with the aim of developing a clinical blood test for a clearer diagnosis of severe asthma.
Chris Carvalho
Chris works as GP in Hackey, East London and is a research fellow with the Clinical Effectiveness Group in the Centre for Primary Care in the Wolfson Institute of Population Health at Queen Mary. In his fellowship, Chris will explore how age, sex, ethnicity and socioeconomic factors affect heart and kidney medication in patients with chronic kidney disease. This will help clinicians to make more personalised treatment plans for patients.
David Lim
David is currently a paediatric endocrinologist at Southampton’s University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. He will be moving to the Centre for Endocrinology at the William Harvey Research Institute of Queen Mary, to undertake his fellowship. His research will focus on Noonan Syndrome, a genetic disorder which causes poor growth in childhood and can cause heart abnormalities. By understanding the unmet needs currently faced by patients with Noonan Syndrome, David aims to improve early diagnosis and methods of treatment, as well as the overall patient experience.
Katila George
Katila is a senior clinical trials nurse who joined the Centre for Preventive Neurology in 2019, where she now leads on the OPTMISE Multiple Sclerosis (MS) study. During her fellowship, Katila will review antiCD-20 – a form of treatment for MS – in relation to pregnancy and lactation. She will explore how the associated risks are communicated to pregnant women and design tools to better support MS teams in discussing this with patients.
(Katharine) Julia Hurry
Julia works as an academic clinical fellow in paediatric dentistry at Queen Mary. Following a recent study which indicated that a family approach to tooth decay prevention is more effective than an individual based approach, Julia aims to create accessible, relevant and family focused advice, suitable for East London families.
Bhavna Sharma
Bhavna is currently undertaking specialty training in diabetes and endocrinology. During her fellowship, she will be examining a protein called AIP, which, when missing in the body, causes severe heart disease. By finding an explanation of how AIP functions in the heart muscle, Bhavna hopes to inform how patients with heart failure are treated.
Tha Nyi
Tha is currently a clinical research fellow and cardiologist at the NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre at Queen Mary. Tha’s fellowship will focus on the relationship between rheumatoid arthritis severity and heart problems, to develop an earlier detection of heart failure in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. This will allow for the timely treatment of patients, as well as the opportunity to explore new treatments.