CoL Centre 2025 Students

Araminta studied for a BSc in Biology, followed by a Master’s by Research in Cell Biology at the University of Kent. In 2023, she joined the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health as a Research Assistant in Dr. David Michod’s group, investigating the role of epigenetic factors in the pathogenesis of Diffuse Midline Glioma.

Araminta is a CRUK CoL Children and Young People’s Cancer PhD student at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health under the supervision of Prof. J. P. Martinez-Barbera. Her project will investigate the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the tumour-promoting activity of senescent cells in tumour development and relapse in paediatric diffuse midline glioma.

Calum studied Chemistry with Pharmacology at the University of Birmingham, in which he worked within Robert Neely’s research group, developing novel methods for epigenetic profiling. He then went on to join the resulting spin out, Tagomics as their first employee where he spent the last 4 years developing the technology for commercialisation and innovating around it.

He is based at the Barts Cancer Institute working within Nitzan Rosenfeld’s group and will be investigating new methods for early cancer detection using serum.

Eleanor received her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences with honours in Molecular Genetics from the University of Edinburgh. Following this she worked as a Research Assistant in Professor Nancy Papalopulu’s lab at the University of Manchester, investigating the role of gene expression dynamics in cell state transitions in breast cancer and neurogenesis.

Eleanor is based at Barts Cancer Institute. Her primary supervisor is Dr Lovorka Stojic, BCI and secondary supervisor is Dr Nnenna Kanu, UCL/Crick. Her PhD project will focus on dissecting mutational and non-mutational regulation of SWI/SNF chromatin remodelling complexes in lung cancer.

Huile is interested in the role of the microbiome in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HN-SCC). At present, there is a critical unmet need to improve the effectiveness of treatment for HN-SCC, and microbiome research offers a promising and emerging avenue for developing new therapeutic strategies. However, the tumour microenvironment (TME) is highly complex, and conventional 2D cell culture systems, although simple and convenient, fail to recapitulate this complexity.
Hence, her PhD research will concentrate on devising a more physiologically complex and relevant tumour-on-chip model, integrating the use of organoids, to better understand the interactions within the tumour microenvironment.

Huile completed my BSc in Life Sciences, specialising in Biomedical Sciences at the National University of Singapore, followed by an MSc in Microbiome in Health & Disease at King’s College London. She is now based within the Reis Ferreira, Joana Neves and Verbruggen laboratories.

Jasmine graduated from the University of Bristol in 2023 with a MSci in Chemistry. In this time and shortly after achieving her degree, she carried out two placements with Merck altering the crystalline properties of anti-cancer drugs. Her Master’s project was also in collaboration with AstraZeneca, who helped publish her findings on crystalline morphological control of Savolitinib upon completion of the project.

Jasmine is based at King’s College London in St Thomas’s hospital. Her supervisor is Graeme Stasiuk and her second supervisors are Elnaz Yaghini, Vijay Chudasama and Kerstin Sander at UCL. In her PhD project she will be developing targeted theranostics for the treatment of breast cancer.

Philippa studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. She specialised in immunology and cancer at the department of Pathology, where she stayed on for an MPhil. Between uni years she had summer jobs at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, the Pasteur in Paris, and here at the Crick, before she decided to apply for a PhD.

Her PhD position is funded by City of London Radiation Research Center (RadNet CoL), and she is co-supervised by Ilaria Malanchi at the Crick and Anthony Kong at KCL. Her project is looking at the role if neutrophils in cancer rediosensitivity. Despite prior local radiotherapy and systemic therapies, many breast cancer patients still develop metastatic disease. This project examines how neutrophils recruited to irradiated tumour sites alter cancer radiosensitivity. Neutrophils are highly plastic cells whose education varies with tissue context and is further shaped by perturbations such as ionising radiation. Because neutrophils participate in tumour responses to therapy, we hypothesise that radiation-educated neutrophils modify tumour responses to radiotherapy. Such neutrophils promote metastatic niches in the lung and contribute to radiation-induced lung fibrosis. Dysregulated neutrophil activation may drive tumour radioresistance and increase the overall risk of breast cancer recurrence overall.

Rochelle studied Biochemistry at Imperial College, then worked for 2 years in France for the biotech company Evotec as a scientific data manager before returning to the UK for her PhD studies.

Rochelle is a PhD candidate on the Black Leaders in Cancer programme stream, and her research aims to focus on the role of mechanosensitive protein Piezo1 in cancer cell proliferation and metastasis. She is based at the Crick Institute as a member of the Rosenblatt Epithelial Cell Extrusion lab. Her supervisors are Jody Rosenblatt, Silvia Santos, and Konstantinos Kalyviotis.

Will is a CRUK City of London PhD Student supervised by Professor James Arnold (KCL) and Professor Kairbaan Hodivala-Dilke (BCI). His research project aims to investigate the role of macrophages and pericytes in shaping the perivascular niche and supporting breast cancer progression. The goal of his project is to identify the mechanisms of communication between macrophages and pericytes, and to subsequently leverage this communication axis to improve the efficacy of standard therapies.

Laura is an MBPhD student in the Sarcoma Genomics and Biology Lab at the UCL Cancer Institute. Under the supervision of Professor Nischalan Pillay and Professor Sandra Strauss, her research explores the use of circulating nucleic acids to detect early recurrence and monitor therapeutic response in genomically complex sarcomas.

She began her medical training at UCL in 2021 and joined the lab in 2023 through a summer research studentship, where she investigated the methylation landscape of clear cell sarcoma. In 2024, she completed an intercalated BSc in Medical Oncology, during which she undertook a research project at the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health, exploring the tumour microenvironment in metastatic neuroendocrine tumours.

Laura aims to pursue a career as a clinical academic in medical oncology.

Eitan is a Clinical Research Training Fellow in Dr Reuben Benjamin's Cellular Immunotherapy Lab (KCL). In his PhD, he is investigating mechanisms of resistance to anti-BCMA CAR-T cell therapy in multiple myeloma, with a view to developing a novel therapeutic strategy to improve efficacy.

James is a clinical research training fellow in the Mansour Leukaemia Biology group at the UCL Cancer Institute, analysing aberrant RNA splicing in AML. His ultimate goal is to identify novel immunotherapeutic targets downstream of abnormal RNA splicing in this aggressive and difficult to treat leukaemia.

Sylvie is a Clinical Research Training Fellow co-supervised by Prof Gert Attard (UCL) and Prof Anita Grigoriadis (KCL). She will be conducting a multi-omic exploration of Lutetium-PSMA radioligand therapy resistance in advanced prostate cancer, investigating multi-region tumour samples from the PEACE study’s Prostate cohort. We will conduct spatial transcriptomics and single-cell DNA sequencing, the latter supervised by Dr Simone Zaccaria who leads UCL's Computational Cancer Genomics group.

Prior to beginning this PhD, Sylvie completed her medical degree at The University of Auckland, New Zealand, and was working as a specialty trainee in Medical Oncology. In 2023, she moved to London to conduct translational research with the Attard Lab at the UCL Cancer Institute.