Training & Capacity Building

Respiratory conditions are sadly very common in Wales and the wider UK. This is a great opportunity to harness the full potential of the UK’s extensive health data. This will allow us to learn who is most at risk and how environmental factors impact on people. We can use health data to target and test interventions to improve respiratory health initially and reduce inequalities in care.

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Programme Theme(s): Describe, Training & Capacity Building

Professor Gwyneth Davies is both Inflammation and Immunity’s Lead researcher for Wales and  Training & Capacity Building theme lead. 

A Professor of Respiratory Medicine at Swansea University Medical School, Gwyn’s expertise lies in understanding the epidemiology, underlying ‘omics’ and health inequalities of respiratory diseases – particularly Asthma. She has substantial experience collaborating with a range of UK-based and international partners.

Her research currently focuses on improving respiratory health to reduce inequalities in care, by using health data to target and evaluate health interventions. Her work

Outside of the programme, Gwyn is also the founding Director of the Wales Asthma Observatory within the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank. In 2020, Gwyn was recognised for her contributions towards improving NHS care and services when she received the Bronze Clinical Excellence Award from the Advisory Committee on Clinical Excellence Awards (2019-2024).

Read Gwyn's professional profile

Read Gwyn's ResearchGate profile

Relevant links

Find out more about  SAIL Databank

Find out more about Wales Asthma Observatory

Definitions

Epidemiology

• The branch of medicine which focuses on the occurrence, distribution and possible control of diseases other factors relating to health

Omics

• A term used to reference several fields of biology which aim to identify, describe and quantify specific biomolecules and molecular processes involved in the formation and function of cells and tissues. For example, genomics focuses on the structure and function of an organism’s genome – it's entire set of genes.

Find out more about omics

Unimpeded respiration is a right, not a privilege.

Programme Theme(s): Describe, Training & Capacity Building 

Dr Mohammad Alsallakh is an Inflammation and Immunity Research Fellow based at Swansea University. He is also the Deputy Lead of our Training & Capacity Building theme. 

Mohammad is a clinically trained health data scientist with an interest in respiratory epidemiology and reproducible research. He is especially passionate about studying socioeconomic inequalities in asthma treatment and care. 

In the UK, people with higher socioeconomic deprivation are disproportionately affected by serious asthma outcomes. This is both unfair to these individuals and potentially costly to healthcare systems. Mohammad’s research, in collaboration with colleagues across the UK, uses routinely collected healthcare data to investigate the drivers, patterns, and trends of asthma inequalities. He aims to quantify the magnitude and economic impact of these inequalities and track their changes. These findings will have the potential to inform the development of cost-effective strategies to improve asthma outcomes, especially for those most affected by them. 

Read Mohammad’s professional profile 

Programme Theme(s): Describe, Training & Capacity Building

Project title: An investigation of the socioeconomic drivers of inequalities in asthma in Wales with a focus on young people 

Cedric Burden is an Inflammation and Immunity PhD student based at Swansea University; he also acts as the programme’s PhD Representative. 

Cedric’s PhD project explores how socioeconomic factors may drive inequalities in asthma care in Wales, specifically among young people. The aim is to generate the information required to better understand and predict severe asthma outcomes, allowing for more targeted, individual-level interventions to be planned. 

He has a background in Physics, Theoretical Physics and secondary education, with a particular interest in using data interrogation and modelling to improve public health. 

Supervisor(s):  

• Professor Gwyneth Davies, Wales Lead (Swansea University) 

• Professor Rich Fry (Swansea University) 

• Dr Mohammad Al Sallakh, Research Fellow (Swansea University) 

• Professor Jenni Quint, Co-Lead Investigator (Imperial College London)