Congratulations to NW paediatric trainee!

Congratulations to Dr Alex Blakes, ACFST2 in Paediatrics and our PRIME Data Lead! He has just secured a Wellcome PhD fellowship!!! It’s delivered through the 4Ward North PhD Academy, a collaborative programme between the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, and Sheffield.

Alex’s research focuses on children with rare genetic diseases. In his PhD, he will explore how certain genetic changes can disrupt normal genome biology and cause these severe conditions. His work combines large-scale data analysis, experiments in the lab, and clinical research involving patients and their families. This work will hopefully lead to new diagnoses and suggest possible new treatments for many children with “unsolved” genetic diseases. Alex is supervised by Prof Siddharth Banka, Prof Colin Johnson, and Dr Jamie Ellingford, and he will be based at the Manchester Centre for Genomic Medicine and University of Manchester.

If you are interested in potentially applying for the Wellcome PhD Fellowship for Clinicians or would like to find out more about the 4Ward North PhD Academy, more details can be found on these websites: https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/schemes/clinical-phd-programmes

and https://www.4wardnorth.org.uk!

Alex and the team at PRIME are also more than happy to talk to anyone thinking about applying for this post or similar positions in the future!

Well done Alex on this amazing achievement!