Meet the team

Emily is specialised in the validity of preclinical research and has a background in pharmacology and neuroscience. Her interests are in the use of meta-research approaches to drive improvements in the validity, transparency and reproducibility of primary research using laboratory models of human diseases. Her work has informed laboratory practice guidelines, editorial policy and clinical trials design. 

Emily is a member of the University of Edinburgh Animal Welfare Ethical Review Board (AWERB) and convenor of CAMARADES.  She tweets as @profEmilySena.

With David Howells, he founded CAMARADES in 2005. In post-doctoral work, he combined his experience of bench research and clinical trials in the application of systematic review methodology to findings from in vivo research. 

While this began in an attempt to identify the most promising drugs for clinical trials, it has since grown to include consideration of risks of bias in animal research, and how these might be minimised by key stakeholders including journals, funders, institutions, and, most importantly, by scientists themselves.

Malcolm is increasingly concerned that we should base our decisions, as far as possible, on rigorous evidence that our proposed strategy will have the desired effect, rather than relying on expert opinion. He is a member of the UK Reproducibility Network (@ukrepro) Steering Group, and tweets at @Maclomaclee

Gillian is specialised in systematic review and meta-analysis of preclinical studies. She uses these techniques to drive improvements in preclinical research, by providing empirical evidence to inform the refinement of experimental design and by investigating the impact of risks of bias on reported outcomes. She is contributing towards implementing new technologies, such as machine learning and text mining, to facilitate the systematic review process so that preclinical studies can inform clinical research. She provides helpdesk support for SyRF users and guidance for those starting systematic reviews.

Kaitlyn is a postdoctoral researcher with a background in Neuroscience and Psychology. She is interested in curating and evaluating the evidence from preclinical animal models of neurological diseases to inform future research and improve methodological rigour and reporting quality. She has also developed automated tools for evidence synthesis to accelerate and expand the scope of the "living" systematic review process. 

She is on twitter @KaitlynHair_

Fiona is a postdoctoral research associate with CAMARADES currently working on synthesising evidence from studies using animal models of mental health conditions such as psychosis, depression, and anxiety. She has a background in in vivo neuroscience and pharmacology research, and transitioned to meta-research during her PhD, which was partly supervised by CAMARADES. Motivated by her own experiences in the laboratory, she is passionate about reproducibility in preclinical research, and understanding how best to use evidence obtained from animal models.

She tweets at @FJRamage

Nicole is a postdoctoral researcher with a background in neurodegeneration, proteomics and bioinformatics. She has previously worked for the UKDRI proteomics facility in Dundee after completing her PhD focusing on synaptic dysfunction in Motor Neuron Disease (MND). Her postdoctoral project focuses on improving the credibility and utility of in vitro research by identifying factors impacting experimental validity in in vitro studies and establishing infrastructure for systematic reviews of in vitro studies. The findings of this project will contribute the reducing the translation gap between preclinical studies and clinical settings.

She tweets at: @HindleyNicole

Charis is a clinical fellow in data-driven drug selection and neurology registrar. She developed a framework using multimodal data including systematic reviews, experimental drug screening, bioinformatics and mining drug and trial databases to inform drug prioritisation and selection for clinical trials in motor neuron disease, specifically MND-SMART as part of her PhD. She is continuing to enhance this framework by including other types of data, incorporating automation tools to make the process more scalable and efficient, and extend this work to inform drug prioritisation in other diseases. She tweets at @DrCharisWong.

Emma is a PhD student with a background in neuroscience. Her PhD is focused on developing meta-research frameworks for in vivo research of genetic conditions associated with intellectual disability and autism. She is supervised by Dr Emily Sena and Professor Peter Kind.

She is passionate about open research practices and science communication.

She is on Twitter @EWilsonSci

Francesca is a PhD student supervised by Professor Malcolm Macleod and members of the GALENOS consortium. 

She joined CAMARADES after the completion of a Masters research project that explored the potential of machine learning techniques to increase efficiency of qualitative and quantitative synthesis of preclinical research relevant to the in vivo modelling of psychosis. 

Her doctoral research will aim to develop automated tools that allow the systematic identification and evaluation of research most relevant to particular subgroups of patients suffering from psychosis, depression and stress disorders. She hopes that these tools may ultimately be used to inform the design of clinical trials relevant to the personalised treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Clara is a Research Assistant with a background in Psychology and mental health. She recently finished her master’s in Psychological Research here at UoE and is now preparing for her PhD. Her passion lies in reproducibility and open research, and she is a strong believer of the FAIR principles of research data curation. She presented in November’s 2023 ReproducibiliTea, where she talked about her data management under her MSc Dissertation and its publication process. She recently joined the CAMARADES group and is currently working on systematic reviews and meta-analyses in preclinical studies and on SyRF design.

Daria is a Research Assistant with a background in pharmacology and neuroscience. Before joining CAMARADES, Daria spent three years working in academic publishing, where she developed a passion for improving research quality and reproducibility. Within the CAMARADES research group, she is primarily involved in assisting with the iRISE and GALENOS projects.

Sean is a Data Analyst who works predominantly on the SOLES (Systematic Online Living Evidence Summaries) Package. He enjoys developing methods to automate the SOLES workflow as well as creating tools for data extraction.

Sean discovered a passion for coding while studying Mathematics at the University of Glasgow. After a fairly long stint as a musician he returned to coding, completing courses in Python and Professional Data Analysis before joining the CAMARADES team.