Research interests
As part of the maternal and fetal disease group, Dr Dixon has worked on understanding genetic susceptibility to cholestatic pregnancy for a number of years; this work is ongoing. He has also researched other maternal diseases affecting reproductive health including molar pregnancies and has worked on understanding the role of the placenta in maternal disease. He is also involved in metabolomics projects (in collaboration with ICL and the University of Southampton) to identify new biomarkers and predictors of maternal metabolic disease and early reproductive loss. Recent grant awards as a co-investigator include BRIDGE-ICP (an NIHR BioResource capacity award for whole genome resequencing) and PITCHES (an MRC-EME drug trial with embeddded mechanistic studies).

Biographical details
Dr Dixon is the senior scientist in the Maternal and Fetal Disease group within the Division of Women’s Health. He worked briefly with the group head, Prof Catherine Williamson, in 1998 when the group was starting after completing his Ph. D. at Imperial College London. Following post-doctoral research in Neurogenetics at UCL, Harvard and Singapore he returned to the group in 2004 when it was based at the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Imperial College London on the Hammersmith Campus. Since the group moved to King’s, he has been based primarily at the Guy’s campus. He maintains strong collaborative links with several research groups at ICL together with other groups world-wide and continues to teach MSc students (Reproductive and Developmental biology) on a course he co-designed. He has a strong interest in the origins of Egyptian civilization and has worked on archaeological survey missions (as a photographer) in the Eastern desert as part of a team from the University of Minnesota. He contributed over 100 photographs of pre-dynastic rock art for two volumes of site records. Outside of academia, he is a keen cyclist and enjoys snowboarding.