Clare Elwell is Professor of Medical Physics at University College London. She studied Maths, Physics and Chemistry at A level and in 1984 was sponsored to attend the London International Youth Science Forum. It was at this event that she attended a lecture about Medical Physics and it was this experience that inspired her to study this subject at university. She went on to complete a BSc and MPhil in Physics with Medical Physics at the University of Exeter, and a Ph.D in Medical Physics at University College London (UCL). Throughout her career as a medical physicist she has worked at the interface of technical development of instrumentation and its clinical application.

She is the Director of the Near Infrared Spectroscopy Research Group in the Biomedical Optics Laboratory at UCL developing novel optical techniques to image the human brain  Her research projects include studies of autism, acute brain injury in adults, children and infants, sports performance, migraine and malaria. In 2012 she was awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenge Exploration grant to use optical imaging to investigate the impact of malnutrition on infant brain development in rural Gambia. This project resulted in the first ever brain imaging of infants in Africa and led Clare to establish the globalfnirs (www.globalfnirs.org) initiative to introduce optical brain imaging into global health projects. This work has progressed to the BRIGHT project (Brain Imaging for Global Health www.globalfnirs.org/the-bright-project) which is currently studying brain development in African and UK infants from birth to two years of age.

Clare has won awards for research (the 2016 Women in Science and Engineering Research Award), teaching (the 2014 Inspirational Women Teacher’s Award) and public engagement (the 2012 UCL Provost’s Public Engagement Award). She is passionate about encouraging and supporting the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Clare is the principal sponsor for Young Scientists for Africa.

For more information see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medphys/contacts/people/celwell