My name is Helen and I started my PhD at Imperial College in October 2018.
My main interest is to understand structural changes that occur in the lungs of children with pre-school wheeze or childhood asthma, also known as remodelling. Imagine your lungs are like balloons: they have to be flexible to expand while you are breathing in and to deflate when you are breathing out. During pre-school wheeze or asthma, however, your lungs can change: they may for example become stiffer, which makes it harder to breathe, just like it is harder to blow up a balloon made of more rigid rubber. I want to understand exactly how this remodelling occurs, and I hope that a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms will help to develop targeted treatments in the future, to help all children breathe more easily.