Welcome to the Higgins Lab

Imperial College London
DEPARTMENT OF BIOENGINEERING

January 06, 2020

Helena is now a Techcelerate fellow, with the Enterprise lab at Imperial College.  For the next 4 months she will learn entrepreneurship skills, and determine how to take her therapeutic for wound closure from bench to bedside.

December 10, 2019

Really thrilled to be featured in the 1st episode of this 6 part series on BBC called Secrets of Skin, hosted by the brilliant Ben Garrod.  The episode we were in, titled Adaptation, features our work on foot skin, explaining how it has adapted to its' extreme loading environment.

November 07, 2019

Helena published her PhD thesis work, in which she identified a cytokine which can accelerate wound closure in human skin in vitro and ex vivo.   We hope to use this to engineer bandages which accelerate healing of skin after injury.

October 09, 2019

Colin published his postdoctoral work looking at what enables skin on the soles of our feet to withstand their extreme environment.  We aim to use the knowledge of how sole skin tolerates its extreme environment to design more robust skin substitutes and perhaps even augment our skin to resist injuries

April 16, 2018

Helena Topouzi, the Higgins lab's first student, successfully defended her thesis on the 'Role of fibroblasts in human skin homeostasis' yesterday.  She is now Dr Topouzi.   Congratulations!

October 10, 2017

Charlie, Summik and Julià joined the lab to conduct their PhD studies.  We went to the Queens Arms for lunch to celebrate our expansion :).

December 08, 2016

We went out for our lab Christmas dinner last night, and had a great three course meal at Le Mercury in Islington.

December 05, 2016

Martina Ghetti, a PhD student at the University of Bologna is back this week in our lab :-).  Martina spent 4 months with us earlier in the year, when her lab focus was to characterise the extracellular matrix which is deposited by different sub-populations of fibroblasts in the skin.  She is back this week to take some final confocal images to go in her paper.

November 22, 2016

Dr Colin Boyle is a new postdoctoral researcher who joined the lab today to work on a 3 yr project funded by the EPSRC.  See the people pages for more information about him and his project.

October 09, 2016

Charles Dench is a 4th yr MEng student in Bioengineering who joined the lab today for his final year project.  He will be researching the mechanisms of Heterotopic Ossificiation after burns.

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October 02, 2016

Nick and Magda are new PhD students who joined the Higgins lab today.  We had a lab lunch to welcome them to the group.  See the people pages for more information about Nick and Magda, and their projects.

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