Professor Elizabeth Bradbury Group Leader and MRC Senior Fellow

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Dr Athanasios Didangelos Research Fellow

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Dr Katalin Bartus Post-Doctoral Research Associate

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Emily Burnside Research Associate

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Merrick Strotton PhD Student


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Ellen Sinopoulou PhD Student


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Charlott Repschlager PhD Student


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Ebrahim Bakhtar EMY student


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Professor Elizabeth Bradbury Group Leader and MRC Senior Fellow

Elizabeth Bradbury is a neuroscientist at King’s College London specialising in regenerative medicine. She did her PhD and Post-Doctoral training at the Institute of Psychiatry and St Thomas’ Hospital in London and then received a Career Development Award from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to establish her own group at King’s College London in 2003. She was subsequently awarded a Senior Non-Clinical Fellowship from the MRC in 2011. Research in the Bradbury lab focuses on understanding processes of injury and repair and developing therapies to restore function following CNS trauma, with a particular interest in glial scarring, extracellular matrix modification and neuroplasticity after spinal cord injury.

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Dr Athanasios Didangelos Research Fellow

Thanos has been a member of the Bradbury Lab since 2012 as a post-doctoral researcher, and is now an independent research fellow studying mechanisms of inflammatory activation and extracellular matrix remodeling after spinal cord injury. He is currently using systems-wide bioinformatics on proteomics and transcriptomics datasets together with different cell biology approaches, to understand the interplay between matrix remodeling and chronic sterile inflammation in the injured spinal cord. Before joining the Bradbury Lab, Thanos completed his PhD at Imperial College London studying inflammatory signaling and tissue turnover after injury. He focused on matrix protein biochemistry, cell signaling (MAP kinases, NFkB & TLRs) and the molecular mechanisms of inflammation and matrix turnover. During his first PostDoc, he developed a proteomics-based methodology, which allowed the characterization of tissue turnover and proteolysis in disease with high analytical resolution and enabled the in-silico interrogation of the extracellular proteome using bioinformatics.

Dr Katalin Bartus Post-Doctoral Researcher

Katalin received a first class BSc degree in Pharmacology from University College London, whilst gaining research experience during her studies as a technician in different laboratories. Before joining the Bradbury Lab, Katalin completed her PhD in Prof. John Garthwaite’s Lab at University College London studying nitric oxide-mediated signal transduction in the central nervous system. Her main research focus in the Bradbury Lab is to develop and optimize a gene therapy approach to manipulate extracellular matrix proteoglycans in order to improve function following a spinal cord injury (SCI) that closely resembles the trauma characteristic in humans. Additionally, her aim is to determine the mechanisms underlying the recovery that is observed as a result of proteoglycan degradation by chondroitinase. Another key focus of Katalin’s research is to gain mechanistic understanding of spontaneous repair processes that occur after SCI. Although associated with a very severe pathology, some spontaneous functional recovery after SCI is observed in almost all cases. One known spontaneous intrinsic repair process that takes place in a number of pathologies including SCI is remyelination of surviving axons that have lost their insulating myelin sheaths as a result of the injury. Repair and maintenance of this insulating myelin sheath is absolutely vital for normal nerve conduction and hence efficient transduction of bodily functions between the brain and the body via the spinal cord. However, mechanistic insight into what governs this endogenous regenerative event is lacking. Understanding the molecular events involved in this process is important and could be exploited to further enhance function of surviving systems in the injured spinal cord leading to improved functional recovery.

Emily Burnside Research Associate

Emily did a degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Neuroscience. During this time she undertook a research project and summer placement under the supervision of Dr Liz Muir and Professor Roger Keynes working with Chondroitinase ABC (ChABC) in-vitro. She undertook a four-year PhD in the Bradbury Lab in 2012 (funded by an MRC Health Schools Studentship) and completed the Ohio State University SCI training course in 2013. Emily's PhD project mostly focussed on working towards trying to develop a method to learn more about the functionality of new connections, which therapies aim to promote, using functional fluorescent probes and real-time imaging, but also contributed to the collective research goal of optimising a ChABC gene therapy approach to promote repair following spinal cord injury. The latter included utilisation of a regulatable ChABC gene therapy system using a doxycycline-inducible vectors developed with the CHASE-IT consortium, work she is continuing into post-doctoral research within the Bradbury lab, as well as conducting other new collaborative projects.

Merrick Strotton PhD Student

Merrick obtained a first class BSc in Molecular and Cellular biology from the University of Bath including a year placement studying novel nicotinic receptor pharmacology at Eli Lilly. He obtained an MRes in Translational Research with distinction as part of the King’s Bioscience Initiative at King’s College London during which time he worked on endocannabinoid signaling in neurogenesis; the role of promyelocytic leukemia protein in neurodevelopment; and in the Bradbury lab on viral vector delivered Chondroitinase ABC. Now continuing his PhD in the Bradbury lab and having completed the Ohio SCI training course, Merrick is evaluating modified carbon nanotubes as a possible neuroprotective agent and non-viral vector tool for manipulating targets of interest in the injured spinal cord, in a collaborative project with his second supervisor Dr. Khuloud Al-Jamal. He has also developed a model to study therapeutic hypothermia at a range of temperatures in rat and is pursuing it's optimal parameters and effects at the cellular level when applied after injury.

Ellen Sinopoulou PhD Student

Ellen Sinopoulou obtained her BSc in Neuroscience from the University of Glasgow. She conducted research in the spinal cord group of Prof. David Maxwell where she also did her undergraduate thesis work, under the supervision of Dr. David Hughes, focusing on the lumbar spinal cord and the serotonin 5HT(2B) pain receptors. She obtained her Joint MSc in Neuroscience from the University of Strasbourg (France) and the University of Freiburg (Germany). During this time she did her thesis work in the laboratory of Prof. John H. Martin at City College of City University of New York where she studied the normal development of the corticospinal tract in a cat model using indwelling recording and stimulation techniques. She continued to work on the same model from 2012 until 2015 when she started a 3 year PhD in the Bradbury lab at King’s College London. Her goal is to develop the optimal combination of physical and electrical neurorehabilitation techniques to improve upper limb functions after spinal cord injury. She is funded by the Nathalie Rose Barr studentship from Spinal Research.

Charlott Repshlager PhD Student

Charlott is jointly supervised by Professor Liz Bradbury and Professor Jonathan Cooper, investigating novel spinal cord pathology found in the early-onset and rapidly degenerative genetic disorder Batten Disease.

Ebrahim Bakhtar Extramural year student

Ebby is an extramural year placement student working under the supervision of Dr Didangelos and Prof Bradbury on novel cellular and extracellular constituents of the central nervous system injury environment.

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