Harold Macmillan Professor of Medicine
I was founding joint co-ordinator of TREAT-NMD, and am an executive board member of the World Muscle Society and R&D Director of the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust. Together with Hanns Lochmüller, I was responsible for setting up the German National Muscular Dystrophy Network, MD-NET, of which I was joint coordinator until 2008.
I trained as a paediatric neurologist at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Essen in Germany. After completing my PhD thesis on Duchenne muscular dystrophy, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the laboratory of Kevin Campbell at the University of Iowa. In 2003, I joined Newcastle University's Institute of Genetic Medicine as the Professor of Neuromuscular Genetics.
I have a long-standing interest in the pathogenesis of muscular dystrophies and within the Neuromuscular Research Group at Newcastle, am engaged in research using zebrafish and mouse models. I have a special interest in the use of MRI in muscular dystrophies and the insight that contrast-enhanced MRI and quantitative MRI can give into the dynamic processes underlying muscle fibre de- and regeneration.