Susan Heavey is a cancer research fellow interested in use of ex vivo models to predict treatment response in cancer.
She undertook her Bachelor's degree, post-graduate diploma, PhD and first postdoctoral research projects in Dublin Ireland, before joining UCL in 2016. Here she spent two years initiating and developing the PEOPLE pathway, which enables a number of downstream research projects to benefit from access to high quality human prostate cancer specimens sampled using a new MRI targeting technique. This multidisciplinary undertaking connects researchers across wide ranging disciplines with clinical, pathological and surgical teams to deliver meaningful research geared towards patient benefit. During this two year postdoc position she also worked on the 100,000 Genomes Project with Genomics England, and a number of clinical trials, most notably INNOVATE and FORECAST.
In 2018 Susan began a Travelling Prize Fellowship funded by Prostate Cancer UK, based between UCL and Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in America. Her fellowship focuses on spatial transcriptomic approaches to assess pre-clinical drug combinations in an ex vivo human prostate cancer model, downstream of the PEOPLE pathway.