Skip to main navigationSkip to main content
The University of Southampton
Medicine

Southampton academic receives highly coveted Fellowship award

Published: 8 January 2016
Dr Marta Polak
Dr Marta Polak

Faculty of Medicine postdoctoral researcher, Dr Marta Polak, has been awarded a highly competitive Sir Henry Dale Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust and The Royal Society.

The Sir Henry Dale Fellowship is awarded to outstanding postdoctoral scientists wishing to build their own UK-based independent research career addressing an important biomedical question. It brings together two of the world's most prestigious and influential scientific organisations, in their shared commitment to supporting the future leaders of biomedical research.

Marta receives her award with a grant in excess of £800,000 and two new posts: a post-doctoral researcher and a PhD student role.

Her research will investigate how the immune system and human skin are involved in the development of allergies in early life, and how we can prevent or cure them.

Allergy is a chronic disease that is expected to affect more than 50% of all Europeans in 10 years' time. Recent studies demonstrate, that skin can be successfully used as a gateway for therapeutic interventions, aimed at improving the body's immune defences. Such interventions on the skin would create an attractive strategy in allergy treatment and prevention, but we need to understand better how the immune responses are regulated in human skin.

Within her research, Marta intends to use bioinformatics – a cutting edge approach using a supercomputer for analysis of data generated with advanced sequencing techniques.

The cohorts of patients will be recruited to the study in collaboration with clinical academics: Dr Michael Ardern-Jones; Professor Syed Hasan Arshad; and Professor Graham Roberts from the UHS Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.

Two partnerships with external contributions are also attributed to the award: Professor Tom Freeman of the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh; and Professor Harinder Singh of the Cincinnati Childrens’ Hospital Medical Centre.

On receiving news of the award Marta said: “The support from the University of Southampton has been vital and the award would not have been possible without its existing expertise in researching allergy diseases and in computer sciences.

“I wish to extend my thanks to my colleagues from Clinical and Experimental Sciences and the senior Faculty.”

Paramount to Marta’s success was her proven track record of published research, about regulation of immune responses in humans, in leading medical journals such as the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

Related Staff Member

Privacy Settings