SoAR Research Champions

Natalie has completed her PhD at the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, focusing on taking a mixed methods approach to understanding influences on appetite in older people. Prior to this, she was an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow in Geriatric Medicine, and is currently completing her clinical training. In her role as a SoAR Champion, she is pleased to provide peer support to other health professionals commencing on their clinical academic career.

Veena leads UHS research into neurodegenerative diseases. She oversees the team’s role in national and international studies and trials, particularly for Parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease, Huntingdon’s disease and dementia. She is an experienced neurological rater, and is responsible for leading and supporting the training of research staff for specialised outcome measures used to determine effectiveness of drug trials in dementia. Her past academic experiences include working on a large Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration, SPHERE, alongside engineers and computer scientists, that involved exploring the use of wearable sensors for predicting falls. She is currently doing her PhD exploring Fatigue in Parkinson’s Disease. She intends to continue to further her career in research, alongside her clinical work, and is particularly interested in the potential for digital tools such as wearables to improve patient care. She is an active member of the European Huntington’s Disease Network’s Physiotherapy Working Group that aims to develop evidence-based resources on rehabilitation and physical activity for people with Huntington’s Disease. She is also part of the Trial Management Group and the Infrastructure Working Group for the EJS-ACT PD Initiative, which is focussed on setting up a multi-arm, multi-stage (MAMS) platform trial for evaluating new therapies in Parkinson’s Disease. In her role as a SoAR Champion, she seeks to support other health professionals who are looking to pursue a clinical academic career.

John trained as an adult nurse, with roles in emergency care and intensive care, before moving into cancer care in 2014. He is now one of four Lead Advanced Clinical Practitioners in cancer care at UHS. He is doing a PhD three days a week, funded through a UHS R&D Doctoral Fellowship. This aims to answer questions around how acute oncology services should be run, and what works best. He is conducting interviews with cancer patients who accessed services and their caregivers, and a comparison of services in several UK hospitals. He became a SoAR Champion to help other health professionals incorporate research into their career.