Thiloka Ratnaike joined the department as a NIHR-funded Paediatric academic clinical fellow, supervised by Prof Chinnery. She is currently working as an Academic Clinical Lecturer with the Department of Paediatrics.
Amongst her other spare-time roles- she is also developing a Paediatric trainee research network!
Thiloka has a long-held interest in mitochondrial research, having completed her PhD in 2012, in Newcastle. Her current research theme incorporates the problem of phenotype-genotype relationships in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases.
She has developed the MitoPhen database while working with Dr Greene and Prof Turro (now based in New York, USA), to investigate the utility of phenotype similarity scoring for prioritising potentially pathogenic mtDNA variants in large rare disease sequencing projects. Thiloka is keen to take this work forward with the help of the team!