Dr Talal Al-Mayhani PhD MRCP
Talal Al-Mayhani is a neurology training doctor at the Royal Free Hospital, London. He supports the teaching of 2nd year undergraduate students at Clare in neurobiology and human behaviour. His medical research focuses on the basic science of neural stem cells and brain cancer and, more recently, on engagement with clinical research.
Outside medicine Talal has a degree in history and philosophy of science, and interest in education/health systems, political theory and cultural criticism. He serves as Trustee for AlThuraya Foundation, a UK-based charity for postgraduate scholarships. Talal has published essays and articles in a number of newspapers, and in his general and medical blog Braincerto. He enjoys drawing, learning languages, reading and collecting antiques.
Dr Michelle Arora
Michelle Arora is a Consultant Paediatrician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and Clinical Lead for Student Experience at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine. She is a national expert on Assessment and Feedback in medical education, and represents the University of Cambridge on the Medical Schools Council Assessment Alliance.
Her research interests include exploring feedback seeking in learners using qualitative methodology.
She edits the Member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (MRCPCH) written examinations for postgraduate paediatric trainees and has recently been appointed national RCPCH Undergraduate Assessment Adviser.
DR SIMON BUCZACKI
Simon Buczacki is an academic consultant colorectal surgeon and a Fellow and Director of Studies for Medicine at Clare College. He is a College Lecturer in anatomy and has provided supervisions in anatomy to the first and second year medics at Clare for almost ten years.
Simon is also a Group Leader at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute where his research group is interested in the interaction between genetic sub-clones and cancer cell identity.
Clinically, he has a sub-specialty interest in neuro-endocrine tumour surgery. e: sjab2 at cam.ac.uk t: @SiBucz w: https://crukcambridgecentre.org.uk/users/sjab2camacuk
Dr Jason Carroll
Dr Carroll runs a breast cancer research lab at Cancer Research UK, investigating the mechanisms of cancer progression and drug resistance. He is also Founder and CSO of Azeria Therapeutics, which develops new cancer treatments.
At Clare, he is the Hammond Careers Tutor, providing career advice for students, and running career-related workshops.
One important aspect is work experience, which is becoming essential for students to gain the best jobs and graduate positions, but can be difficult to identify and organise. Part of his role at Clare is to establish work experience positions that are available only to our students.
Links: Lab- http://www.carroll-lab.org.uk/ Azeria- https://www.azeriatherapeutics.com/
Professor Nicky Clayton Professor of Comparative Cognition, Department of Experimental Psychology and Scientist in Residence, Rambert Dance Company
What is your subject and specific area of study?
I study the evolution and development of intelligence in crows, apes and young children. I work mainly with members of the crow family (corvids) in a variety of species including jackdaws, rooks and jays, although I also have some studies on rats, bats, apes and young children.
I am currently also working with Ballet Rambert to produce a new, Darwinian-themed ballet called The Comedy of Change. You can see a video of one of the dances, as well as an interview with me, here. e: [email protected]
See also Nicola Clayton Profile: Nicky and the Jays, Morell, V, Science, 315, 1074-1075.
Dr Laurence Drake
Laurence Drake studied medicine at St John’s, Cambridge then Addenbrooke’s. After completing the West Suffolk GP Scheme he became a GP Principal at Greensands Medical Practice in Cambridgshire/Bedfordshire for 26 years. His clinical interests are ophthalmology, musculoskeletal medicine and teaching. He enjoys violin playing, hill walking, and vintage motoring and engineering.
Dr Richard Dyball
Richard Dyball studied veterinary medicine at Clare. As an undergraduate he became interested in the brain and later in animal welfare. After spells researching in Bristol, New York, the Babraham institute and King's College London, he returned to the Department of Anatomy (now PDN) at Cambridge and to Clare as Director of Studies in Medicine teaching anatomy and neurobiology and researching on how information is carried by nerves. He is now retired but still examines anatomy for the Royal College of Surgeons, and demonstrates in the dissecting room.
Paul is recently retired from a Readership in Cancer Biology in the Department of Pathology. He was previously Director of Studies in Pathology and in Medical Sciences, and still lectures on cancer to medical, veterinary and natural science courses.
His research has been on breast cancer, and in recent years has focused on the cancer genome, particularly trying to catalogue the large-scale rearrangements of DNA, such as chromosome translocations, that remain poorly understood in common cancers. This research continues as part of two large projects at the Addenbrookes Site to sequence genomes of breast and oesophageal cancers.
PROFESSOR PAUL FLETCHER PhD FMedSci FRCPsych
Paul is Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience, Wellcome Investigator and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist. He is Director of Studies for the MST 1B students, providing lectures and supervisions on neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry.
His research concerns learning, perception and decision-making and how these may be disrupted both under normal circumstances and under the influence of drugs or mental illness. He also has a growing interest in the interaction between mental health and video games and was part of the BAFTA-winning development team that created “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice” which depicts psychotic illness in the context of a game. e: [email protected] t: @PaulPcf22 TEDx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV2RLLtOgL4 BAFTA: http://www.bafta.org/games/awards/british-game-0
Professor John Gibson
John Gibson came to Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1978, graduating in NST Physiology in 1981, PhD in Physiology in 1984 and VetMB in 1987.
He has been supervising medics, vets and NatScis since 1981. He currently teaches Systems Physiology at Clare.
Aside from Cambridge he has worked in the University of Liverpool and St George’s Hospital Medical School, London. His research focuses on ion and water homeostasis in cells, with particular emphasis on red cells in sickle cell disease.
Professor Bill Harris
Director of Studies in Neuroscience, and Professor of Anatomy
My work focuses on the following questions, and others: Where does the nervous system come from in the embryo? How does it grow to the right size and shape? How do stem cells turn into more committed neuronal progenitors and how do these cells know when to leave the cycle and differentiate into neural and glial progenitors? Once born, how do these precursors differentiate? How do they choose a particular cell type to become amongst a myriad of possible fates, and by what cellular mechanisms do these cells become properly polarised, branched, and integrated into the neural circuitry of the developing brain? What mechanisms allow neurons to send out long axons that forge pathways to their targets in the brain, and recognise specific cells within these targets?
I teach Part 1B Neurobiology as a supervisor for NST students and am Director of Studies for Part II in Physiology Development and Neuroscience and in Psychology Neuroscience and Behaviour which has a share of Medics and Vets. e: [email protected] http://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/staff/harris/index.shtml http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?harris Professor Philip Jones
Phil Jones is Professor of Cancer Development at the MRC Cancer Unit, Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and an academic consultant Oncologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
Phil gives supervisions in anatomy to first year medics at Clare.
In the clinic Phil treats patients with skin cancer. His research interest is in how normal cells accumulate mutations as we age and the impact of this on cancer development. This has led to the insight that Darwinian evolution operates in our tissues, offering the hope that interventions that alter evolutionary selection may cut our risk of getting cancer. https://www.sanger.ac.uk/science/groups/jones-group
Dr Heike Laman
Dr Laman is a Senior University Lecturer in the Division of Cellular and Molecular Pathology in the Department of Pathology. She is Director of Studies for IB Pathology students and Part II Pathology and Genetics students. She also supervises IB Cellular and Developmental Biology.
She researches the biology of ubiquitin ligases using mouse models, trying to understand their impact in different tissues types and how their mis-regulation causes disease. She is also working on translating the potential of ubiquitin ligases into novel types of therapeutics to treat cancer and Parkinson's disease.
Daniel Marcos
Dr Daniel Marcos is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Oncology since 2015 and Clare College Research Associate since 2016. He supervises Neurobiology Natural Sciences Tripos 1B students (2nd year undergraduate). He did his undergraduate training and PhD in the Department of Biochemistry (University of Extremadura, Spain) in the field of calcium pumps and their relationship with the beta-amyloid peptide. He spent time in the Centre of Molecular Biology (Madrid; Spain), Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and Centre for Membrane Pumps in Cells and Disease (Aarus, Denmark) where he reached a deeper understanding of the mechanism of calcium pumps. Now Daniel is based in the Department of Oncology studying the post translational modifications of ASCL1, a transcription factor master regulator of the nervous system development with an important role in the Neuroblastoma, the most common childhood cancer. He has also developed an interest in the understanding of the molecular basis of brain disorders.
Dr Paul A R Meyer MD FRCP Consultant Medical Ophthalmologist (retired), Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.
I am the son of an artist and a nursery school teacher: both warm, creative intellectuals. As a child, my main preoccupations were art, cello, experiments and inventions (often with unpredicted consequences). I studied Medicine at Clare (1969), then University College Hospital, London. There followed skirmishes with psychiatry (UCH), emergency medicine (UCH), cardiology (Hammersmith and Ealing) and gastroenterology (Cambridge). A desire to observe immune complex deposition in living microcirculations required me to learn eye examination and I became mesmerised by ophthalmology – in which pathology can be observed, in living tissues, with single-cell resolution. I never returned to general medicine. However, I met patients whose eye diseases were accompanied by systemic illness, which I could not resist treating – and the eyes often recovered. In this way, the discipline of Medical Ophthalmology began at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and I became the consultant. Particular interests were auto-immune inflammation and thyroid eye disease. For the latter, I developed immunomodulatory treatment and a theoretical model, explaining disease evolution. I retired in 2017.
During my MD, having demonstrated the formation and deposition of immune complexes, I elucidated the patterns of blood flow in the human eye. This demanded several new imaging techniques: haemoglobin video imaging (HVI) records red blood cells traversing human conjunctival microcirculations and, contrary to current dogma, they appear to be driven by microvascular peristalsis. HVI is emerging as a clinical technique for assessing systemic diseases afflicting small blood vessels, determining effects of vasoactive drugs, investigating glaucoma and staging thyroid eye disease. I am currently refining it in the University Engineering Laboratory.
I met my wife, Ruth, while playing string quartets (although we remembered a previous meeting at a Gordon Wright sherry party in Clare). We have three children and two grandchildren, and live in a beech wood outside Cambridge. Our daughter has cerebral palsy and endless hours have been spent designing and making equipment for her, including the variable-abduction hip-brace and a wheelchair. (For my wife, I made a violin; for myself, I have invented adjustable focus spectacles.) We still play music, and I also make relief prints on my father’s Victorian printing press. Dr Thomas Nixon
Thomas Nixon is an ophthalmology registrar in training and supervises head and neck anatomy.
PROFESSOR ANNA PHILPOTT
Prof. Anna Philpott is a developmental biologist with a long-standing interest in how cells in developing embryos control the decision to divide or to differentiate in co- ordination with cell cycle events, as well as how this coordination is subverted in cancers.
After a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD. at Cambridge followed by post-docs. at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre and Harvard Medical School, Anna start her own lab in the Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge in 1998, where she continues to study fundamental mechanisms that allow co-ordination of the cell cycle and differentiation in early development. Recently, she has identified cyclin- dependent kinase-dependent phosphorylation of proneural transcription factors as a critical fulcrum that co-ordinates cell cycle exit and differentiation. This control is subverted in cancers, in particular the paediatric tumour neuroblastoma, and offers a potential new approach to treating this devastating disease.
Anna is now Professor and Deputy Head of Department in Oncology, as well as a member of the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and is Director of studies for Molecular Biosciences within the Natural Sciences Tripos.
Dr. Jenny Pitts
Dr Pitts supervises the second year’s pre-clinical Pathology course (Biology of Disease) for Clare and many other Cambridge Colleges and devotes most of her time to this.
A graduate of the University of Southampton, Dr Pitts moved to Cambridge to work in the Department of Pathology and then for many years in the Institute of Biotechnology. Her particular research interests are mechanism and therapy of sepsis, particularly meningitis and complications following cardiac surgery. She collaborated with both the Intensive Care Unit at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Heart Transplant Unit at Papworth Hospital. She continues to maintain a keen interest in the latest development in these fields.
Professor David Rowitch
Professor Rowitch is a developmental neuroscientist and Head of Department of Paediatrics at University of Cambridge. He obtained his MD from University of California Los Angeles and PhD degree from Cambridge University while a student at Clare College (‘84).
Professor Rowitch is a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator. His laboratory investigates genetic factors that determine development and diversity of glial cells of the brain and the response to injury. He has applied these principles to better understand white matter injury in premature infants, brain cancer and leukodystrophy. His interest in precison medicine focuses on applications of genomic technologies to diagnose and better understand the biological basis and rational treatment of rare neurological disorders. https://paediatrics.medschl.cam.ac.uk/about-us/people/senior-academic-staff/professor- david-h-rowitch/
Dr Rouchelle Sriranjan
Rouchelle is a MRC research fellow and an honorary cardiology registrar at Addenbrookes’ Hospital. She is also a visiting Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University.
She teaches Clare medics who’ve transitioned into years and mainly undertakes clinical supervisions in the form of bedside teaching. She also provides guidance on Student Self-selected Component (SSC) modules and elective funding for Clare medics in their clinical years.
Her research interests include early phase clinical trials, interventional cardiology and cardiovascular imaging. She is also interested in using emerging technologies to develop teaching platforms. e : [email protected]
Dr Edgar Turner
University Lecturer and Curator of Insects, University Museum of Zoology, and Fellow and Tutor for Access and Outreach at Clare College.
Ed is a conservation scientist, who researches strategies that can be employed to conserve species diversity and healthy ecosystem functioning both in the UK and abroad. Ed is Director of Studies for Part 2 Zoology at Clare College and therefore acts as Director of Studies for medic and vet students choosing this option in their third year.
Professor Lorraine Tyler Research Professor of Experimental Psychology
Lorraine K Tyler is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. She heads the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain, an interdisciplinary research group which combines neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and behavioural methods to reveal how the human brain is organised to support language, perception, and meaning. This work is currently supported by an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant.
She also leads the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (CamCan). CamCan is a University-wide consortium, funded by the BBSRC, to study how age-related changes in brain structure and function relate to patterns of preserved and declining cognitive functions with age.
Professor Tyler gained her PhD from the University of Chicago in the Department of Behavioural Sciences. Originally trained as an experimental psycholinguist, her longstanding interest in language and the brain initially focused on studies with brain- damaged patients and since 1998 has involved extensive research using neuroimaging methods (fMRI and MEG).
She worked at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen before moving to the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and from there to Birkbeck College. She returned to Cambridge in 1998. e: [email protected] w: https://cslb.psychol.cam.ac.uk//people/lktyler DR DAVID WEBSTER DPhil
David Webster obtained his D.Phil at Oxford, and then worked for 6 years as postdoctoral fellow doing research in the Cambridge biochemistry department. He has taught from 1980 until the present as supervisor for several 1A and 1B Natural Sciences and Medical and Veterinary Science subjects at Cambridge. He has also worked for the Open University and taught A level biology part-time (including almost 20 years at Hills Road School in Cambridge). David currently supervises Molecules in Medical Science (MIMS) (Biochemistry), which he started teaching at Clare in 1975 and is a Bye Fellow at Christ's College.
Dr Sophia Shellard-von Weikersthal M Pharm equiv. (Freiburg) PhD (Freiburg)
Dr Shellard-von Weikersthal supervises in neuropharmacology and mechanisms of drug action
DR MICHAEL ZANDI MA MB BChir PhD FRCP
Michael Zandi is a Clare alumnus (1996), consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square London, honorary senior lecturer at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, and specialises in autoimmune encephalitis.
He teaches 2nd year undergraduates in neurobiology. He plays the guitar and is interested in music theory, jazz and folk music.
E: [email protected] t: @michael_zandi