I studied Physics as an undergraduate, and despite specialising in Particle Physics, I knew I wanted to work in a more applied field for my PhD. I wanted to see my work have a direct impact, and that ultimately led me to Medical Physics. As it happens, my brother has cerebral palsy, and while I was never consciously aware of it, looking back I do wonder how much that influenced my research interests.
I moved to UCL from Oxford for my PhD, and had an excellent experience. I was given lots of great opportunities to develop by my supervisor, Professor Jem Hebden. Immediately after my PhD I took up a postdoctoral position at Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital, where I continued to work with biomedical optics but also with MRI. I was given several different projects to look in to, and they all turned out to be really interesting, so it was a really productive few years. Once again I was lucky to have a generous supervisor, who allowed me to pursue my own ideas. I came back to UCL in 2012, and won an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship in 2016. I am now busy trying to build up my own fledgling research group, which is an exciting but very challenging experience, and very different to postdoc life.
I’m interested in developing technologies that allow us to image the brain outside of the typical, restrictive scanner environments; be that at the patient’s bedside, or in the everyday world. I’m particularly interested in the neonatal brain. Newborns are extremely vulnerable to brain injury and remain tragically underserved by biomedical technologies. At the moment I am developing a new generation of wearable diffuse optical tomography devices that use miniaturised electronics and near-infrared light and to map brain function at a resolution approaching that of fMRI.
My principal goal is to use this technology to map the development of the parts of the brain that control movement, in order to better understand how cerebral palsy emerges over the first few weeks and months of life. Cerebral palsy is the most common physical disability of childhood, and about 1800 children are diagnosed every year in the UK. The big problem is that diagnosis often comes very late. The idea is to use this new, infant-friendly neuroimaging technology to support early diagnosis and monitoring, and therefore enable earlier treatment.
To get to that point, I will need to overcome some pretty big engineering problems, but in solving these for the infant, I hope to drive a big leap forward in the usability of this technology in other populations and in other fields, particularly in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
What I enjoy most about my work is the variety. Medical Physics is inherently interdisciplinary, so over the course of one day I may spend time discussing brain injuries with clinicians, developing optoelectronics with engineers and designing experiments and data analysis approaches with neuroscientists.
I would advise anyone thinking of a career in Medical Physics to identify early on what areas of the field excite you. As you progress, try to condense these ideas into a single sentence that sums up your research goals. Having this clearly defined will help you decide what PhD project or research direction or job is right for you, and having this narrative in place will be very useful when you come to think about fellowships and grants etc. Secondly, make sure to find the people to work with that are right for you. It has made an enormous difference to my career to have the support of outstanding supervisors and collaborators, both clinical and academic.
