We’re delighted to announce our new Clinical Research Training Fellows for 2025/26. This year, we’re 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 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 salary support, as well as PhD fees and research costs.
Meet this year’s successful fellows and learn more about the research that they will be doing:
Kieran Palmer
Kieran is currently an Honorary Clinical Fellow at both Barts Cancer Institute and University College London. During his Clinical Research Training Fellowship, he will be exploring early molecular changes within breast tissue that are associated with cancer behaviour. If successful, this could lead to a routine test that will help doctors identify which breast cancer patients are at high risk of recurrence.
Alan Mitchel
Alan currently holds a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Academic Clinical Fellowship in Haematology at Barts Health NHS Trust and Queen Mary University of London. He will be investigating how leukaemia cells rewire how they process fat to survive treatment, and testing whether blocking these survival tricks with targeted drug combinations can overcome treatment resistance in AML. This work could ultimately support new clinical trials and offer new long-term solutions for people with AML
Nicky Gilbody
Nicky works as an Advanced Clinical Specialist Speech and Language Therapist at Barts Health and is also a Clinical Tutor at the School of Health and Medical Sciences at City St George’s, University of London. Her fellowship will focus on patients who have undergone a laryngectomy (the removal of the voice box), developing an intervention that will help patients to replace their own prosthetic voice valve without depending on healthcare services.
Saira Nazeer
Saira is a Research Therapist in Critical Care at Barts Health. During her fellowship, Saira aims to further understand how and why many people who have been discharged from intensive care don’t engage with further support. By talking to patients, health workers and community groups, Saira will develop a solution to support better engagement with services after critical illness.
Karen Aspey
Karen currently works at Whittington Hospital as a Paediatric Specialist Trainee and will be moving to Queen Mary to undertake her PhD. Her research will focus on a protein called MRAP2 and its role in regulating energy balance and blood sugar. By understanding how this protein works and interacts with other proteins involved in metabolism, she aims to better understand how its loss leads to weight gain. This may lead to additional treatment options for obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Harry Ward
Harry is currently a NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow in Rheumatology at Barts Health. In his fellowship, he’ll be studying a protein called HHARI that drives a type of immune signalling strongly linked to autoimmune diseases like lupus. He will explore how HHARI contributes to these conditions, and investigate whether existing drugs that disrupt its function could offer new treatment options for for autoimmune conditions.
Ava Zamani
Ava is a specialty trainee in Medical Oncology and is currently also an Education Fellow in Oncology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. As a Barts Charity fellow, Ava will be using new technology to identify unique markers on bowel cancer cells that the immune system can be trained to recognise. Her research aims to improve how personalised cancer vaccines are designed, with the goal of improving cure rates for patients with bowel cancer.