Briefly, tell us about your background and career up to this point?
I opted for medicine when told (aged six) that I was not the right shape to be a ballerina. I trained at Guy’s Hospital School of Medicine, intercalating a BSc (in pathology, with the inspirational Joe Abdullah and Sidney Leibovitz) and after a few years of clinical training posts, was lucky enough to be offered a research fellowship at Yale – I went for a year and stayed three. That was life-changing. My supervisors were Bob Sherwin and Bill Tamborlane, creators of the US version of insulin pump therapy for type 1 diabetes, and my research (in hypoglycaemia - low blood glucose - prevention) was very topical because it was the time of the Diabetes Control and Complications Trial, the study which proved the benefit of intensified insulin therapy for preventing diabetes complications, but at the cost of more hypoglycaemia. So when I came back to the UK, I was considered an academic, by everyone except me.
Three years later I won my first substantive post as a Senior Lecturer at Guy’s, by now part of the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals (UMDS), following my own mentor, Prof Harry Keen – very difficult shoes to fill. I was also an honorary consultant in general medicine, doing acute medical take and in patient diabetes care, with a great team of colleagues, juniors, brilliant nurses and admin people, who continued to work as a team during all the challenges of the introduction of working time directives, EU regulations and job planning. I took the newly-created RD Lawrence chair of Diabetic Medicine (the first chair in the field in the UK, created by Dr Peter Watkins) at King’s Denmark Hill in 1995, converting to a chair in diabetes research in 2018, and to emeritus status in 2021. My roles have included an enviable mix of working with patients and clinical colleagues and carrying out research into questions that arose from that – collaborating with amazing people from many different disciplines to address them.
What advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?
Be on the look-out for opportunities – and seize them when offered. Do not be too constrained by routine – do what seems exciting and feels right to you. The best way to decide between two options is to toss a coin and realise that if it falls one way, you would make it the best of three. That tells you what your heart is saying!
Do you have any current projects that you’d like to tell us about?
I am currently working with Americans! One major theme I have followed throughout my career has been the investigation of the pathogenesis of problematic hypoglycaemia – low blood glucose episodes that complicate even the best managed insulin therapy in people with diabetes. The US National Institutes of Health are funding a multi-national study of the impact of the newest insulin delivery technology on this problem. My team at King’s created an intervention for people who struggle to avoid hypoglycaemia despite optimal management and the CLEAR project will use our intervention as a rescue package to investigate for study participants for whom the technology does not produce resolution of their hypoglycaemia. I am also working with Alex Lin in Michigan, investigating how modern communication channels such as text messaging, might be used, to deliver our messages to a much wider community. It is very exciting to be working with the next generations of clinical academics in diabetes.
What do you do with your time outside academia/work?
What time would that be?! More seriously, although I don’t seem to have sorted out the usual principles of retirement, I do squeeze in time to paint, to read, to walk in the Lake District with my northerner husband, go to the opera and, occasionally, to write non-scientifically.
Who inspires you most and why?
Apart from my husband, Prof Sir K George Alberti, it is the people I have had the privilege of working with over the years. This may sound like a cop-out but the great joy of an academic career is the opportunities it provides to meet and talk to the greats of the day and to work with people in different disciplines with different perspectives to answer questions important to people with, in my case, diabetes. My best research has been made possible by colleagues in paediatric hepatology and transplant surgery; diabetes educators; neuroimaging scientists; biostatisticians and nutritional scientists – and by clinicians and people living with diabetes. Without these people, nothing.
If I have to pick two names, they would be Bob Sherwin and Arnold Bloom, who were my role models for clinical academe and patient care respectively – and Harry Keen of course who made it possible for me to work with them.
What is your favourite thing about working at King’s?
My colleagues and my patients.
QUICK-FIRE:
Favourite season: Spring
Favourite London restaurant: Giovanni’s in Covent Garden
One thing you could not go a day without: Porridge
Most-used emoji: Crossed fingers