Professor David Adams discusses his research.
Duration: 4.03mins
Speakers
S1 Professor David Adams, Professor of Hepatology
Transcript
My primary research interest is in liver disease and specifically in the immunology of liver disease. So many of the diseases that we treat in the clinic are driven by an immune inflammatory response which causes damage to the liver resulting in hepatitis and cirrhosis. My interest has been trying to understand the mechanisms that underlie that damaging response and particularly focusing on two areas; one is factors that regulate that local response within the liver and the second area, which has been a long standing interest of mine, is understanding how damaging inflammatory cells are.
One of the real pleasures about running a lab is that you have students and fellows who come from all over the world so we have had fellows from many countries in Europe, from Canada, Australia, the United States, India, and some of these have gone on to be very successful. So one of my recent PhD students is now an associate professor at the University of Calgary, [B… Epstein - 0:01:15] and he has just attracted a large research grant from the Canadian Government to develop a very important area of research which builds on the work he did with us in Birmingham. Other students of ours are running units in France, in Turkey and in Germany and many other countries. So it’s been a very exciting and interesting career working with people from all over the world.
We put a big emphasis on our students networking with senior researchers because this can be really inspirational for them to talk to people who have succeeded and who have really defined the field. We have a series of seminar programmes with invited researchers from all over the world visiting the university and we’ll also have people coming through and spending two or three days with us, funded for instance by the Centre for Liver Research. We’ve just recently had a long-standing senior clinical scientist, a colleague of mine from Australia, who came and spent two days with us and he spent a full day talking to our PhD students, going through their experiments and their data with them and this is something that they find enormously exciting to discuss their research with a senior person in the field who can give them advice. And also inspire them to hopefully take their work further.
I think Birmingham is a great place for international students to visit and to work in. We’ve got wonderful facilities, particularly basic science research facilities linked to a hospital with really strong clinical programmes. So some of the foreign visitors who have come and worked with us in the lab have also been clinicians who have worked clinically at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital as well. Furthermore the campus in Birmingham is contained, it’s beautifully laid out and this part of Birmingham is a really nice place to live.
My aspirations looking forward are very much to try and take our research into the clinic and what would really make me happy at the end of my career would be to see something that I’d discovered and worked through in the lab actually come through into the clinic and provide real benefit for patients. So that is my big goal at the moment. But in addition to that it is just to keep doing good research and good science and work and train with an inspirational group of young fellows and students
End of recording