Elizabeth Bradbury is a neuroscientist at King’s College London specialising in regenerative medicine. She did her PhD and Post-Doctoral training at the Institute of Psychiatry and St Thomas’ Hospital in London and then received a Career Development Award from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to establish her own group at King’s College London in 2003. She was subsequently awarded a Senior Non-Clinical Fellowship from the MRC in 2011. Research in the Bradbury lab focuses on understanding processes of injury and repair and developing therapies to restore function following CNS trauma, with a particular interest in glial scarring, extracellular matrix modification and neuroplasticity after spinal cord injury.

Katalin received a first class BSc degree in Pharmacology from University College London, whilst gaining research experience during her studies as a technician in different laboratories. Before joining the Bradbury Lab, Katalin completed her PhD in Prof. John Garthwaite’s Lab at University College London studying nitric oxide-mediated signal transduction in the central nervous system. Her main research focus in the Bradbury Lab is to develop and optimize a gene therapy approach to manipulate extracellular matrix proteoglycans in order to improve function following a spinal cord injury (SCI) that closely resembles the trauma characteristic in humans. Additionally, her aim is to determine the mechanisms underlying the recovery that is observed as a result of proteoglycan degradation by chondroitinase. Another key focus of Katalin’s research is to gain mechanistic understanding of spontaneous repair processes that occur after SCI. Although associated with a very severe pathology, some spontaneous functional recovery after SCI is observed in almost all cases. One known spontaneous intrinsic repair process that takes place in a number of pathologies including SCI is remyelination of surviving axons that have lost their insulating myelin sheaths as a result of the injury. Repair and maintenance of this insulating myelin sheath is absolutely vital for normal nerve conduction and hence efficient transduction of bodily functions between the brain and the body via the spinal cord. However, mechanistic insight into what governs this endogenous regenerative event is lacking. Understanding the molecular events involved in this process is important and could be exploited to further enhance function of surviving systems in the injured spinal cord leading to improved functional recovery.

Isaac is a a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with expertise in immune system function following spinal cord injury.

Emily is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate working to develop optimised & temporally regulatable Chondroitinase ABC gene therapy as a preclinical treatment for spinal cord injury, alongside other collaborative projects featuring biochemical and biophysical manipulations of injured spinal cord extracellular matrix properties. This extends work from her PhD studies in the Bradbury lab, which also featured a project trying to develop a method to study functional generation of new neural connectivity using fluorescent indicators of neuronal function in ex-vivo adult rodent spinal cord slices. Emily complete the OSU Spinal Cord Injury Training course in 2013 and is a graduate of Natural Sciences, specialising in Neuroscience (University of Cambridge, UK).

Naomi is a Research Assistant in the Bradbury lab. With a background and BSc in Animal Welfare, Naomi is responsible for the successful actioning of multiple projects in the lab.

Ellen Sinopoulou obtained her BSc in Neuroscience from the University of Glasgow. She conducted research in the spinal cord group of Prof. David Maxwell where she also did her undergraduate thesis work, under the supervision of Dr. David Hughes, focusing on the lumbar spinal cord and the serotonin 5HT(2B) pain receptors. She obtained her Joint MSc in Neuroscience from the University of Strasbourg (France) and the University of Freiburg (Germany). During this time she did her thesis work in the laboratory of Prof. John H. Martin at City College of City University of New York where she studied the normal development of the corticospinal tract in a cat model using indwelling recording and stimulation techniques. She continued to work on the same model from 2012 until 2015 when she started a 3 year PhD in the Bradbury lab at King’s College London. Her goal is to develop the optimal combination of physical and electrical neurorehabilitation techniques to improve upper limb functions after spinal cord injury. She is funded by the Nathalie Rose Barr studentship from Spinal Research.

Charlott is a PhD student under the joint supervision of Professor Liz Bradbury and Professor John Cooper. Her PhD focuses on the novel characterisation of spinal cord and peripheral nervous system pathology in models of juvenile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (Batten disease).

Lucy is a PhD student in the Bradbury lab, working on neuroimflammatory signalling and extracellular matrix scarring following spinal cord injury.