Our People

Miriam is a cancer biologist and joined the University of Westminster in 2002, establishing the Cancer Glycobiology Laboratory. Prior to this Miriam read her PhD and undertook Post Doctoral Studies in the Medical School at UCL with the charity founder Dr Anthony Leathem.  Miriam is responsible for bringing in and leading the Against Breast Cancer Unit.

Claire is a nutritionist and epidemiologist who has worked on the INTERMAP project - a worldwide study of heart disease and dietary intake. Claire offers support to the members of the Diet & Lifestyle team.

Thirty years ago Anthony was a pathologist at Middlesex Hospital - later University College London (UCL). Disturbed by the number of post mortems he carried out on young women with breast cancer, he has since devoted his life to improving breast cancer survival. Anthony retired from his post as Head of the Breast Cancer Research Group at UCL in 2009 and currently holds an Honorary Senior Lecturership. He remains actively involved as an advisor to the group.

 

Ruth is responsible for the day-to-day management of the Diet & Lifestyle study, coordinating sample collection, sample movement, ensuring quality control assessment, integrity of data entry and outputs from the study.

Annie is involved with patient recruitment to the Diet & Lifestyle study and takes a lead in querying the databases for subsequent data analysis.

Babak is studying changes in the sugars attached to proteins (often found increased in cancer tissue samples) using naturally occurring carbohydrate binding proteins (lectins) and antibodies from cancer patients. The aim is to identify cancer proteins that might later be targeted in treatment strategies.

Simon's work is focussed on human serum; this fraction of human blood contains thousands of different proteins. The aim of the work is to identify proteins in the serum which may serve as markers of the presence of breast cancer and may be useful for monitoring response to treatment.

Hannah's work concentrates on immunoglobulin A and in particular on the sugars attached to this protein as this may serve as a marker for both breast cancer and breast cancer progression.

Diluka is studying proteins from breast cancer tissue samples of patients with secondary cancers in the axillary lymph nodes. The aim of the work is to identify proteins associated with the spread of cancer beyond the breast to secondary organs (metastasis).