People
Professor Rachel Tribe
Rachel Tribe is Professor of Maternal and Perinatal Health. She trained as a physiologist (BSc Special Dual Hons Physiology and Zoology) at the University of Sheffield and gained a PhD from the University of London focusing on dietary salt intake, sodium transport, and bronchial reactivity. Subsequently, as an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellow she studied smooth muscle intracellular calcium regulation at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, USA. On returning to the UK, Dr Tribe became interested in pregnancy and preterm birth and now leads a multidisciplinary research group in the Dept. of Women and Children’s Health, KCL funded by the MRC, Borne Foundation, Action Medical Research, Rosetree Trust, Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and Tommy’s charity. Professor Tribe’s research focuses on translational research related to preterm birth and other pregnancy associated conditions. Specific interests include uterine ion channel physiology, female reproductive tract innate immune system and interactions with the microbiome in pregnancy, identification of biomarkers for prediction of preterm birth and the potential of combining breastfeeding with probiotic supplementation to improve infant gut health. Professor Tribe collaborates with colleagues in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Kenya, The Gambia, Mozambique and India. She has a global health portfolio of studies to understand preterm birth phenotypes and prediction in different settings, leading the PRECISE Spontaneous Preterm Birth Study and is a Co-I on the PRECISE Network.
Professor Mark Johnson
Professor Mark Johnson is the Clinical Chair in Obstetrics at Imperial College, and a Consultant Obstetrician and Head of R&D at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
He began his research early in his career. His PhD, supported by The William’s Fellowship from the University of London, defined the role of relaxin in human pregnancy and was awarded in 1995. Clinically, Mark initially trained in general medicine, endocrinology and diabetes, specialising in reproductive endocrinology. He set up the highly successful IVF unit in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. He later trained in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, becoming the only dually accredited Consultant in General Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the UK, following which he became the Professor in Clinical Obstetrics at Imperial College in 2010.
Borne was a research appeal at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital charity initiated by Mark in 2013 to support translational research that advances our understanding of pregnancy and identifies solutions to prevent or delay the onset of preterm labour. It became an independent medical research charity in 2016.
Professor Michael Taggart
Dr Mario Falchi
Mario is a Reader in Computational Medicine at King’s College London, and Head of Bioinformatics for the School of Life Course & Population Sciences. His interests lie in the development and application of statistical and computational genomics methods to disentangle the network of susceptibility factors – and their interactions – that lead to complex disease in humans, with a particular focus on metabolism, skin cancer, and renal diseases.
Recently his team has been focusing on leveraging next generation sequencing technologies to assess the influence of rare and structural variants on complex traits, and on characterisation of the microbiome using metagenomics data to investigate the interplay between the gut microbiota and host metabolism.
Dr Roser Vento-Tormo
Roser’s research is focused on the adaptation of immune cells in tissues and their function in steady state and inflammation. Her team uses genomics, spatial transcriptomics and bioinformatics tools to reconstruct the microenvironment that will shape immune cellular identity and function.
She is passionate about the capacity of immune cells to communicate with their neighbours and coordinate complex, tailored responses. Her team has a special interest in modelling cellular interactions and uses single-cell, spatial transcriptomics and functional assays to reconstruct the signalling mechanisms underpinning cellular behaviour in healthy and diseased tissues.
