Natalie Shenker

After leaving Oxford University medical school, I initially pursued a career as a surgeon for 5 years. During this time, I gained the MRCS (Eng) with 3 years on the St Thomas' basic surgical training rotation and at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and a further year in teaching and research. I left clinical medicine in 2008 shortly after starting run-through training as a NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow in paediatric surgery, as I wished to develop other interests.

After gaining Distinction and the year prize in the Masters in Reproductive and Developmental Medicine at Imperial College, I was awarded a MRC PhD studentship, and am now in the second year of my PhD. I'm primarily interested in the intragenic epigenetic changes that occur in breast cancer, specifically focusing on intragenic DNA methylation and the ESR1 gene. We obtained the first grant of tissue samples from the newly established Breast Cancer Campaign Tissue Bank, which I cam currently analysing to correlate with previous cell line findings.

My work has recently extended into an investigation into the effects on DNA methylation of smoking in a prospectively collected cohort of healthy individuals who went on to develop breast or colon cancer. This work involves collaborations with the EPIC study group, based in Turin, and with the pulmonary pharmacology group based at Imperial.

I have become experienced in quantitative methylation analyses, including pyrosequencing, cell culture, array-based tools and quantitative PCR, with a developing proficiency in the R data analysis software.

I have recently published a review of the field in the British Journal of Cancer: Intragenic DNA methylation: implications of this epigenetic mechanism for cancer research. Shenker N, Flanagan JM. Br J Cancer. 2012 Jan, 106(2): 248-53.

Please contact me for further information on natalie.shenker09@imperial.ac.uk.

PhD Student; supervisors: Dr. James Flanagan, Professor Bob Brown

The Epigenetics Group

Department of Surgery and Cancer

Imperial College London Hammersmith Campus

Du Cane Road, London, W12 0NN

TEL:    020 759 42138

FAX :   020 759 42129

natalie.shenker09@imperial.ac.uk