After graduating in Physiology from King’s College London, I worked as research technician in child health at Leicester Royal Infirmary. In 1988 I became a clinical physiologist at Charing Cross Hospital and began a PhD studying exercise breathing. My first postdoctoral position (also at Charing Cross) involved neurophysiological research on severely brain-injured patients.

In 1998 I moved to Harvard to research mechanisms of breathlessness and returned in 2004 to a lectureship at Imperial College. In 2010 I spent a year as research scientist with UK Spinal Cord Injury Research Network at Stoke Mandeville Hospital before starting my current post.

My primary research interest is to find out how breathlessness (‘dyspnoea’) arises so that more effective drugs can be developed to relieve dyspnoea when the underlying disease can’t be cured. The multidisciplinary research involves experiments on healthy volunteers and various patients who are inordinately breathless.

I have tested hypotheses regarding ‘air hunger’ (an unpleasant component of dyspnoea), validated ways to induce specific components of dyspnoea using specially-constructed breathing circuits and developed a unique questionnaire that quantifies overall breathlessness (intensity and unpleasantness) and is based on the language patients use to describe their experience. The work has guided on-going clinical studies including randomised-controlled trials to test novel interventions.