Malcolm is helping develop research careers through the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).

He is driving forward a strategy that aims to attract, retain and develop people along the career pathway, from pre-doctoral scholar to senior research leader.

Malcolm is a clinical academic, splitting his time equally between his clinical and academic roles. He encourages people from all professions to get in touch for career advice and support.

Building research careers

Malcolm is the NIHR Southampton BRC’s Academic Career Development Lead.

He has an appreciation and passion for developing careers including research scientists, nurses, midwives, allied health professionals (AHPs), healthcare scientists, pharmacists and doctors.

The BRC’s Capacity and Capability Strategy invests in talented people using open, transparent and competitive processes through mentoring programmes, leadership development programmes and individualised learning based on needs analysis.

Improving cancer surgery outcomes

In his academic role, Malcolm is Associate Professor of Colorectal Surgery and Prehabilitation Medicine at the University of Southampton (UoS). In his clinical role, he is a Consultant Colorectal and Complex Cancer Surgeon at University Hospital Southampton.

His research focuses on prehabilitation for cancer patients. This uses multimodal prehabilitation interventions mainly aerobic exercise to ensure they are physically fit before surgery. The aim is to improve outcomes and hasten their recovery. Malcolm has a keen interest in investigating changes in body composition, mitochondrial function and tumour biology with exercise prehabilitation.

Malcolm is the University’s Southampton Clinical Academic Training Scheme (SoCATS) lead for Academic Clinical Fellows and Academic Clinical Lecturers. He is the clinical lead for the Wessex Cancer Alliance’s rapid diagnostic service for colorectal surgery. He is also the incoming co-chair of the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit programme for southern England.

Research for all

Malcolm has most experience supporting doctors and AHPs. However, he is keen to ensure that people from all professions have the chance to pursue a career in research.

He has a keen interest in career development and education. He currently supervises numerous PhD, MD, MMedSc and BMedSc students. He also mentors research nurses in Principal Investigator roles.

His own career has followed the NIHR Integrated Academic Training (IAT) Programme. This is the standard career path for doctors to become a clinical academic. He has progressed from predoctoral fellow to doctoral fellow (PhD), academic clinical fellow, clinical lecturer and now associate professor.

He completed his PhD with Professors Kemp, Grocott and Jack in 2015. This focussed on prehabilitation, exercise physiology, perioperative surgical risk stratification and mitochondrial bioenergetics. As part of this, he led the first UK prehabilitation study in locally advanced rectal cancer patients undergoing chemoradiotherapy. At the time he was also service Lead for the Perioperative Cardio-Pulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET) at University Hospitals Aintree, Liverpool.

“I want to make sure anyone passionate about research has the opportunity to pursue it as a career.” he explains.

Staff can reach Malcolm at M.West@soton.ac.uk.