Dr Karen Page awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship

Karen Page is a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at UCL and an active member of CoMPLEX, UCL's centre for research at the life sciences interface. She has a degree in mathematics from Queens' College, Cambridge. Her DPhil at Oxford was supervised by Philip Maini, Nick Monk and Claudio Stern. She spent two years at IAS in Princeton working with Martin Nowak and joined UCL in 2001.

She was recently awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to study mathematical models of human tumour dormancy. Dormant phases occur in many cancers. In breast cancer, following mastectomy, patients can harbour small populations of tumour cells which cause no manifest disease for up to twenty years before relapse occurs. Insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of dormancy should prove important in preventing relapses in breast and other cancers.

Karen works on tumour dormancy with Jonathan Uhr's lab at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Ian Tomlinson's lab at the London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK, Lisa Willis at UCL and Tomas Alarcon at Imperial.