Spotlight PhD Student - Rebecca Robertson

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As part of our research  we are featuring Rebecca Robertson who is a first-year PhD student and works with Professor Anna Williams group on pre-clinical trials.

In Rebecca's words, "I’m Rebecca, a first year PhD student on the Precision Medicine programme investigating the role of extracellular vesicles released from endothelial cells in cerebral small vessel disease. I am interested in understanding more about the mechanisms of small vessel disease and how it progresses. In particular, I am looking into extracellular vesicles which are small packages released from cells which are used to communicate to other cells. I hope to determine the differences in number and content of extracellular vesicles released from endothelial cells in order to improve our understanding of the disease. This could lead to better diagnosis and treatment through identifying biomarkers and future targets for drugs."

Rebecca also won the flash talk prize at the ECR Vascular theme workshop held by the UKDRI in York on 14-15 March. Her talk was on “Aberrant extracellular vesicle signalling by endothelial cells - a potential pathological mechanism in cerebral small vessel disease (SVD)?”