Dr Christopher Talbot

Biography

BSc, PhD I was born in Hong Kong, but went to school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. After a BSc at Imperial College in London, I worked first at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington with John Hardy on the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease.I then carried out a PhD as an external student of London University, working at Washington University in St. Louis. The project, supervised by Alison Goate, continued the work on Alzheimer’s disease. Subsequently I returned to the UK to carry out a three-year postdoc with Jonathan Flint at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University. This work in psychiatric genetics aimed to find quantitative trait loci for anxiety in mice. I obtained a lectureship in the Department of Genetics in the University of Leicester in 2001. BSc, PhD I was born in Hong Kong, but went to school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. After a BSc at Imperial College in London, I worked first at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington with John Hardy on the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease.I then carried out a PhD as an external student of London University, working at Washington University in St. Louis. The project, supervised by Alison Goate, continued the work on Alzheimer’s disease. Subsequently I returned to the UK to carry out a three-year postdoc with Jonathan Flint at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University. This work in psychiatric genetics aimed to find quantitative trait loci for anxiety in mice. I obtained a lectureship in the Department of Genetics in the University of Leicester in 2001.

Research Interest

The laboratory has diversified away from Alzheimer’s disease, and now has interest in a range of medical conditions, with a focus on translational applications of genetics. A central project is to find the genetic determinants of adverse reactions to radiotherapy in breast cancer. For this purpose we have recruited a large cohort of patients scored for toxicity and are carrying out genetic studies to find the genetic polymorphisms that influence risk. Genetic variants found will contribute to a future genetic test allowing oncologists to treat patients in a personalised fashion according to their genetic make-up.