Nima Gharahdaghi

Nima is a postdoctoral research fellow in translational immunology at the University of Oxford, where his work focuses on understanding the biological heterogeneity of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases and how this can be translated into more personalised approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

His research particularly investigates cytokine signalling, autoantibodies and immune dysregulation in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). His recent work has examined neutralising autoantibodies against IL-10 and their potential to identify a biologically distinct subgroup of patients with IBD. More broadly, he is interested in integrating functional immunology with biomarkers and patient stratification to understand why apparently similar patients can have different disease mechanisms, trajectories and responses to therapy.

Through his work with the Centre for Personalised Medicine, Nima is particularly interested in communicating emerging developments in precision immunology to wider scientific, clinical and public audiences, and in exploring how mechanistic discoveries can be translated responsibly into clinically useful personalised medicine.

Naomi Marshall

Naomi is a medical anthropologist currently based at Oxford’s Centre for Human Genetics. She is part of the Clinical Ethics, Law and Society Research Group, where she works alongside Dr Susie Weller on two social science research projects: one exploring patients’ experiences of living in limbo while searching for a molecular diagnosis (funded by the MRC-NIHR), and the other examining how family members care for one another following a genetic diagnosis (funded by the ESRC).

During her DPhil, she conducted an ethnographic study of people’s experiences of living with neurofibromatosis in the UK. Her thesis, Insignificant Genes, explored how genetic knowledge can provoke existential reflection and temporal disruption.

Her current work is interdisciplinary and multimodal. Naomi’s research interests include societal attitudes towards genetic difference, genetic identity, and how people use genetic knowledge to anticipate the future, both in relation to their own life course and the lives of their descendants.

Silvia Panetti

Silvia is a lab-based immunologist who studies how tumours disable the immune responses meant to destroy them, and how that process might be reversed. Across her career, this question has taken different forms: how tumours starve immune cells of the nutrients they need, how vaccines can be leveraged to reawaken antigen-specific immunity, and, most recently, how tumours actively reprogramme immune cells into allies rather than attackers.

During her PhD in Immunology and Immunotherapy at the University of Birmingham (De Santo Lab), she investigated amino acid depletion as a mechanism of immunosuppression within the tumour microenvironment, and explored strategies to counter this nutrient starvation in personalised immunotherapies such as CAR-T cells, improving their persistence and efficacy.

During her postdoctoral research at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University of Oxford (Van den Eynde Lab), she turned to next-generation cancer vaccines, investigating how vaccines targeting antigens shared across tumour types could be deployed at scale to boost anti-tumour immunity in a wide range of cancer patients.

She is now funded by Worldwide Cancer Research (Parkes Lab) to study how chromosomally unstable tumours shape the immune cells around them, turning potential attackers into protectors of the tumour itself, with the aim of identifying vulnerabilities in this process that could be targeted therapeutically to break the cycle.

Silvia is particularly drawn to two open questions in the field: how to reconcile the drive for ever more personalised cancer treatments with the need for therapies that are scalable and sustainable within a public health system such as the NHS? And how sex differences in immunity shape cancer treatment response, an area she believes deserves far more research, so that the therapeutic needs of both men and women are properly understood, and personalised medicine lives up to its name for everyone.

Carla Cohen

Carla Cohen is a computational biologist interested in the cells of the musculoskeletal system. Her work is part of the Human Cell Atlas project, a global consortium which aims to map all cells in the healthy human body. Currently she is analysing transcriptomic data from musculoskeletal tissues including tendon, muscle, bone and capsule to create an ethnically diverse atlas of healthy cells in adult knee and hip. This work will produce an open-source comprehensive resource for researchers around the world and will provide a foundation for further studies on human disease.

Carla initially trained as a lab-based scientist and worked across various projects (and continents) in genetics, immunology and rheumatology. She later discovered a passion for coding and moved to a computational role where she enjoys the challenge of identifying patterns in multidimensional data. Carla is also a trainer in computational methods and actively participates in public engagement projects.

Francesca Dakin

Francesca is a postdoctoral Qualitative Researcher (with IRIHS) and Researcher in Digital Health (with the ARC’s Digital Health stream). She is also a Mildred Blaxter Fellow, and a Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College and The Centre for Personalised Medicine.

She is currently working on:

1. AI-enabled tools in access and triage in UK general practice
2. Virtual palliative care
3. Remote and digitalised primary care

Interests:

Digital health technologies; remote consulting; applied artificial intelligence; healthcare organisations; change/innovation; inequalities; patient access; digital triage

Claire Schwartz

Claire supports the development and delivery of research and engagement projects between Clinical Ethics, Law and Society at the Centre for Human Genetics and the CPM. Her post strengthens and enriches existing research partnerships and builds new connections with partners and collaborators to advance the mission of the CPM and its overall strategic vision. 

Claire previously managed an applied health research programme with strong links to the NHS. She was involved in developing collaborations between researchers and health care workers to improve day-to-day care in the NHS, building capacity to make research an integral part of healthcare professional jobs and identifying opportunities to expand the research and maximise its potential to solve real-world problems. Claire has experience of research in large clinical trials and studies and expertise in quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Nishtha Bharti

Nishtha is an Affiliate Researcher with CPM and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the ‘Clinical Ethics, Law, and Society’ group at the Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford. She is researching the complex dynamics that shape identity descriptors – such as race, ethnicity, and ancestry – in genomic medicine and their impact on equitability of care.

Nishtha’s work is situated within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and she combines it with her previous training and teaching experience in Political Science. She engages with techno-scientific trajectories in healthcare (particularly digital, data-driven technologies and Artificial Intelligence) and their unfolding across diverse socio-political contexts and transcontinental sites. Through her collaborations she has also looked at the politicisation of specific COVID drugs to understand the peculiarities of crisis governance and to analyse how knowledge claims are legitimised.

In her broader research pursuits, Nishtha’s enquiries span the shifting socio-political logics, contested values and competing epistemic frames in healthcare reforms through emerging technologies. She completed her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. More information about her research can be found here.

Louisa Chenciner

Louisa is a public health physician with demonstrated experience in climate health, syndemics, and social protection. Last year, she was awarded an NIHR funded academic clinical fellowship in public health medicine. Louisa’s work spans academia and real-world public health, with a commitment to addressing the intersections between climate change, sustainability and health. She is currently an honorary research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an active member of the Oxford University Clinical Academic Graduate School. She also works in local government at Oxfordshire County Council, and contributes regularly to the on-call rota for health protection at the UK Health Security Agency. To date, Louisa has a range of clinical and academic experience in the UK, Sweden, India and Brazil.

Sally Sansom

Sally is a Junior Research Fellow within the Centre for Personalised Medicine and a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) candidate within the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) at the University of Oxford. Prior to commencing her DPhil, Sally worked for eight-years in roles spanning health economics and strategy consulting, and medical research / clinical trial project management. Sally also holds a Bachelor of Biomedicine (genetics major) from the University of Melbourne, and a Master of Public Health (health economics specialism) from Monash University in Australia.

Sally is passionate about progressing the health economics evidence base required to support the cost-effective translation of genomic diagnostic and therapeutic technologies into routine care. In particular, Sally’s research interests lie in improving our understanding of how best to measure the outcomes from genome sequencing for rare disease diagnosis in economic evaluations. Sally is also interested in exploring the spill-over effects of genomic information within families.

More information about Sally’s research can be found here.

Rachel Horton

Rachel was a CPM Junior Research Fellow from 2021 – 25. Rachel is training as a clinical geneticist and is spending some time doing dedicated clinical ethics research alongside her PhD.

Rachel’s research, funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Award for Health Professionals in Humanities and Social Sciences, explores what we should consider to be a genomic result. Genomic testing identifies the millions of variations that each of us has within our genetic code, and Rachel is interested in how and why decisions are made as to which of these variations should be considered the ‘result’ of a genomic test.

Rachel studied medicine at Oxford, doing an intercalated BA in Molecular Medicine in 2008. She worked as a junior doctor in the Severn deanery before moving to Southampton in 2015 to train in clinical genetics. She completed an MSc in Genomic Medicine at the University of Southampton in 2018.