Zoe Wanstall

Zoe Wanstall is the Senior Consortium Manager for CLUSTER, and as such is responsible for all the project management and forward planning of activities across the teams at all the partner sites.  In addition to this she produces the regular progress reports for MRC and Versus Arthritis and manages the partnerships.  Zoe has an extensive project management background, including over 12 years coordinating numerous research and innovation consortia, funded by the EU and various UKRI bodies in both the private and public sector.

Freya Luling Feilding

Freya is the Research Coordinator and PPIE officer for CLUSTER. Her role is to coordinate the research studies that feed into CLUSTER at UCL. She is also responsible for public and parent involvement and engagement throughout the project, including coordination of the CLUSTER Consortium Champions. Freya holds a BSc in Biomedical Sciences and has varied experience across clinical research and charity sector.

Vicky Alexiou

Vicky is a Research Assistant for CLUSTER. Her role is to support Workstrand 1 activities in the UCL team including patient sample processing and analysis of immune cell populations as predictors of JIA outcome and treatment response. She holds an integrated Masters in Biochemistry with a focus on Immunity and Infection from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include the therapeutic potential of immunomodulation and patient stratification in autoimmune diseases

Melissa Kartawinata

Melissa Kartawinata is a Research Fellow for the CLUSTER consortium, working on investigating potential markers and drug targets on JIA (Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis). Melissa obtained her PhD in biomedical science at the University of Sydney, Australia, during which she was the author of multiple publications, including a first author publication on the discovery of a novel gene involved in short telomere syndromes. She then joined the Francis Crick Research Institute as a postdoctoral researcher, where she led a collaborative project with AstraZeneca to identify new gene therapy targets for colorectal cancer.

Wei-Yu Lin 

Wei-Yu is a statistician with expertise in genetic association studies, who is leading the omics analysis for the CLUSTER programme in childhood arthritis.

Sandra Ng 

Sandra is a member of the Centre for Translational Bioinformatics at Queen Mary University of London. She is the TranSMART data manager for CLUSTER and IMID-Bio consortia which involves curating datasets and importing these into a TranSMART data warehouse system.

In addition, she is part of a team investigating intra- and inter-clustering in IMIDs using machine learning techniques. Sandra has an MSc Data Science from Kings College London.

Emil Carlsson

Emil is a post-doctoral researcher at the Experimental Arthritis Treatment Centre for Children at the University of Liverpool, working on experimental sample analysis for CLUSTER within the JIA-uveitis work stream. He holds a PhD from Imperial College London with research interests focused on immune system regulation and ocular disease mechanisms.

Stephanie J W Shoop-Worrall

Stephanie is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester. Her research explores if there are groups, or clusters, of children and young people whose JIA might respond to treatment in different ways. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester a specialises in data science and epidemiology.  

Saskia Lawson-Tovey

Saskia is a data scientist in the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research at the University of Manchester. She works on the extraction, harmonisation, integration, and documentation of anonymised and pseudonymised clinical datasets for the JIA-arthritis (WS1), JIA-uveitis (WS2), and data integration, analysis, and modelling for patient stratification (WS3) workstreams. Alongside her CLUSTER work she is responsible for building and managing the EULAR COVID-19 database and co-building/managing the pilot CAPTURE-JIA database.

Samantha Louise Smith

Sam is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Genetics and Genomics Versus Arthritis at the University of Manchester. She works within the JIA-arthritis work stream and is currently looking for genetic and proteomic makers of treatment response in JIA. In the near future she will also be using single cell sequencing methodologies to aid in treatment stratification and mechanism-driven drug choices. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester with a particular research interest in precision medicine.

Teresa Duerr

Teresa supports the Co-Investigators leading the Industry work stream within the CLUSTER Consortium, in assisting the day to day contacts between CLUSTER and Industry, and delivering the outputs for the workstream. She has worked for 10 years in clinical trials’ administration at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children and has also previously worked in a medical education agency with Industry partners.

Past Members

Alyssia McNeece

Ayssia is the Research Coordinator and PPIE officer for CLUSTER. Her role is to coordinate the research studies that feed into CLUSTER at UCL. She is also responsible for public and parent involvement and engagement throughout the project, including coordination of the CLUSTER Consortium Champions. Alyssia holds a BSc in Biological Sciences & MRes in Medical Sciences.

Bethany Jebson

Beth Jebson is a Research Assistant for the CLUSTER consortium. Her work aims to define novel disease mechanisms and predictors of treatment response in children with Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). She holds a BSc in Biomedical Sciences and an MSc in Clinical Immunology and has an interest in the role the immune system plays in autoimmune disease.

Beth is now carrying out a PhD at the UCL Institute of Child Health investigating the role of immune cells that produce antibodies (B-cells) on the development of JIA-uveitis. Read more about this here

Fatjon Dekaj

Fatjon Dekaj is the Research Coordinator and PPIE officer for CLUSTER. His role is to coordinate the research studies that feed into CLUSTER at UCL. He is also responsible for public and parent invovlemnt and engagment throughout the project, including coordination of the CLUSTER Consortium Champions. Fatjon has a BSc in Biomedical Science & MSc Genomic Medicine, with previous experience in research coordination of various project.