Katharine Lodge has joined the MRC PPU as the first recipient of an MRC PPU Visiting Clinical Scholarship. She will spend three months in the Unit undertaking state-of-the-art proteomics to uncover novel phosphorylation signalling pathways regulated by hypoxia in human neutrophils.
Katharine is currently a Clinical Lecturer and Specialty Registrar in Respiratory Medicine at Imperial College, London. She studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and undertook her Foundation and Core Medical Training in North West Thames and the East of England. She then received a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellowship to study basic mechanisms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), under Professor Alison Condliffe in in the Condliffe/Chilvers lab in Cambridge. During her PhD Katharine uncovered a potential role for phosphorylation signalling pathways in hypoxic neutrophils that mediate its damaging effect on endothelial cells. Under the sponsorship of Dario Alessi, Katharine will work closely with colleagues in the MRC-PPU and Division of Cell Signalling and Immunology to train in global phosphoproteomic methodologies to interrogate hypoxic human neutrophils. This work may uncover new pathways of relevance to COPD and will provide Katharine with new mechanistic ideas to explore in her new lab at Imperial.
The MRC PPU Visiting Clinical Scholarship was established between the MRC PPU and University of Cambridge and is co-directed by Miratul Muqit and Brian Huntly, Professor of Leukaemia Stem Cell Biology, at Cambridge. The scheme enables clinician scientists at any stage of their training to spend time in the MRC PPU undertaking mechanistic analysis that may aid in their primary research question. More information on the scheme can be found at the following link: