From 2013 to 2016, I was awarded doctoral research fellowship by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) in the United Kingdom, through which I undertook my first PhD at Imperial College London. The subject was basic science focusing on non-invasive breath analysis of volatile organic compounds (breath test) for the diagnosis of gastro-intestinal cancer. From 2015 to 2018 I undertook my second PhD at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, through which I developed further knowledge in clinical research in the surgical treatment of oesophageal cancer.
In 2016, I was awarded my first postdoctoral position with a NIHR Clinical Trials fellowship, to support my training in the design and conduct of randomised clinical trials /RCTs) at Imperial College London. Through this fellowship I was also able to work on an RCT comparing minimally invasive with open surgery for oesophageal cancer, which was published in New England Journal of Medicine. In 2017 I was appointed as NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Oesophago-Gastric Surgery at Imperial College London. The focus of my research became cancer survivorship, through which I coordinated three large multi-center European studies with recruitment of over 1000 oesophageal cancer survivors. I also continued my basic science research in breath test analysis as supervisor of PhD students, studying breath profiling of early oesophageal cancer and its premalignant lesion (Barrett’s oesophagus).