Informatics ApproachesTraining Meet one of our Fellows – Dr Sarah Bowden

The NIHR Imperial BRC has a number of fellowship programmes for medics and non-medics, often in collaboration with the Clinical Academic Training Office (CATO). One of such partnership schemes is the Wellcome Trust 4i fellowship, designed to develop the clinical academic leaders of the future in Immunity, Inflammation, Infection and Informatics.

Dr Sarah Bowden was awarded her fellowship in 2018 and has gone on to develop her research skills underpinning gynaecological oncology.

“As a Wellcome Trust/NIHR Imperial BRC 4i clinical research fellow at Imperial College I’ve had an excellent three years working on a novel topic – the exploration of genetic and epigenetic markers of cervical cancer.  This fellowship has afforded me the opportunity to train and work with some of the leading scientists and clinical academics in the field, furthering both my own academic skills and developing new scientific approaches to tackle challenging questions in gynaecological oncology.

I believe one of the greatest strengths of the programme has been the focus on strong academic supervision and I feel very fortunate to have had the support of my supervisors (Maria Kyrgiou, James Flanagan and Marc Chadeau-Hyam) and mentorship from the programme leads (Matthew Pickering, Jeremy Levy, and the CATO staff) through the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With some flexibility, our work has maintained on track and generated some fascinating results that warrant further exploration. Our latest project, a genome-wide association study of cervical cancer in over 370,000 women, has identified three new genetic signals associated with cervical cancer. The study was published in Lancet Oncology last month which was a very welcome recognition of the culmination of many years of collaborative and focussed work.

We are very excited by the results and I hope to now secure a post-doctoral clinical academic position to continue our investigations, particularly into the use of genetic and epigenetic markers for improving the accuracy of cervical screening programmes.”

–Dr Sarah Bowden, Wellcome 4i Clinical Research Fellow

Sarah has received 50/50 funding from the Wellcome Trust and NIHR Imperial BRC.

More information on her recent Lancet Oncology paper can be found here.