Researcher profile

Christine Kelly

I trained in Medicine with medical french (MBChB european option) at the University of Manchester, graduating in 2006. After completing foundation training at the Royal Albert and Edward Infirmary in Wigan, I moved to the Liverpool Deanery to undertake Core Medical Training which included two periods of maternity leave. I was appointed to an NIHR academic clinical fellowship during the first year of my CMT and transitioned to this, completing my 9 month academic block together in 2011. I studied neurocognitive impairment and its relationship to anti-retroviral therapy in a cohort of Malawian adults living with HIV at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH), Blantyre. This study was one of the first to publish normative neurocognitive data for people living with HIV (PLWH) in a low income setting. Following this I was awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship in Global Health through the Liverpool Malawi Wellcome Centre for Global Health, through the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and the University of Liverpool (grant number 099934/12/Z/A). The first year of this 4 year fellowship was spent undertaking a Masters in Research, specialising in Clinical Sciences. This included the Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (LSTM) which I passed with honours. Two projects were undertaken as part of the Masters which comprised a systematic review of clinical outcomes in people living with HIV who experienced suboptimal immune reconstitution, as well as a characterisation of whether host gene expression was altered in people living with HIV who experienced CNS viral escape. The final 3 years of the training fellowship were spent carrying out my PhD in Malawi with the Malawi-Wellcome Clinical Research Programme (MLW) and the College of Medicine, University of Malawi. I investigated endothelial dysfunction and immune activation in people presenting with HIV and advanced immune suppression at QECH. I recruited and characterised a clinical cohort of people living with HIV, disseminated results to clinic staff, and engaged with policy partners on the themes of HIV and non-communicable diseases. I demonstrated increased endothelial dysfunction during the first 3 months of ART (compared to a healthy control group) and implicated PD-1 positive T cells as important players in this relationship. I also published some of the first data linking inflammatory phenotypes in PLWH with clinical outcomes, showing that T cell activation driven endothelial dysfunction improved on ART, but a small subset with an innate activation phenotype suffered persistent dysfunction. During this time I also worked as an Infectious Diseases physician and engaged in teaching and examining medical students, as well as supporting quality improvement projects within QECH and MLW. I was a local co-investigator for the MRC Clinical Trials Unit funded Reduction in Early Mortality in HIV-infected Adults and Children (REALITY) trial. After completing my Wellcome Trust Fellowship I moved to Dublin, Ireland to being speciality training in Infectious Diseases and General Medicine. I became an honorary Clinical Fellow with the Centre for Experimental Pathogen Host Research at UCD where I supported several research studies including clinical recruitment for the All Ireland Infectious Diseases Cohort and serving as co-investigator for the european-wide VACCELERATE study. During the final year of my training I undertook a fellowship in Public Health and Clinical Virology at the UK Health Security Agency, where I obtained FRCPath virology. I am now a Consultant in Infectious Diseases at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, working in the National High Level Isolation Unit. I am also a Health Research Board Clinician Scientist Fellow, investigating clinical diagnostic pathways for imported fever syndromes to support national outbreak surveillance. I am building a research group in Global Health Virology and working within the umbrella of the UCD Centre for Experimental Pathogen Host Research.