Professor Sejal Saglani

Professor Sejal Saglani is a consultant in Paediatric respiratory medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital and part of the Paediatric Difficult Asthma Team. In addition to this role, she leads the Paediatric Severe Asthma Group within the section of inflammation, repair and development at Imperial College London

Professor Saglani studied and qualified in medicine at the University of Leicester before completing clinical specialist training in respiratory paediatrics. Funded by Asthma UK, she then studied her postgraduate degree at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), focusing on the pathology of severe infant and pre-school wheeze, in which she received the NHLI’s best thesis prize.

Professor Saglani’s clinical expertise and research interests include:

• management of pre-school children with recurrent wheezing
• management of school age children with difficult asthma
• factors predicting progression of pre-school wheeze to school-age asthma
• the identification of novel therapies for pre-school wheeze and childhood severe asthma.

Professor Saglani has established a translational research programme, which involves an integrate approach using airways samples from children and direct application and clinical translation of her findings in interventional clinical trials.

After clinical specialist training, Professor Saglani received a British Lung Foundation Research Fellowship to develop an experimental model of allergic asthma and, following this, a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellowship to investigate the mechanisms mediating the onset of pre-school wheeze and asthma in early life.

Professor Salgani has since been awarded a Medical Research Council New Investigator Awards, and currently has a National Institute for Health Research Career Development Fellowship.

In addition, she was awarded the European Respiratory Society Young Investigator Award for Paediatric Research in 2009, and the European Respiratory Society Romain Pauwels Award for Excellence in Translational Respiratory Research in 2015.