Anna Duckworth

About me:

Anna has a physics degree from Cambridge University and a PhD in laser spectroscopy from the Council of National Academic Awards. She worked in the nuclear power generation industry for many years, initially working as a Research Officer applying optical remote technologies to power station challenges, and subsequently working as Projects Manager, Programme Manager and Senior Manager within the UK technology division. She trained as an executive coach and ran a coaching and mentoring business part-time while bringing up her daughter. She is also a professional artist (www.artbyanna.co.uk).

Anna has returned to scientific research in respiratory medicine (Chris Scotton’s team) to help find diagnostics and treatments for the devastating lung disease pulmonary fibrosis, which causes 1% of UK deaths and currently affects an estimated 70,000 people in the UK. She loves her research and also loves working with patients. She is passionate about building our understanding of this disease and helping to find a cure.

Anna is interested in various pieces of the pulmonary fibrosis pathogenesis puzzle and in particular; short telomeres (and other telomere biology disorders), the unusual relationship between pulmonary fibrosis and smoking, familial pulmonary fibrosis and kindred maps, comorbidities such as rheumatoid arthritis, the link with some key single nucleotide polymorphisms, the link with herpes viruses and finding accessible disease biomarkers for diagnosis and monitoring.

She has used bioinformatics for gene expression and gene set enrichment analyses. She is currently working with the UK Biobank data looking at disease causality and influences on disease progression using Mendelian randomization. She will be looking at epigenetic and other blood biomarkers in the lab as part of her PhD.

Grants/Funding:

• GW4 MRC Doctoral Training Partnership funded PhD

BA, MA, PhD