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Imperial Joint health: Understand, Monitor and Prevent (IJUMP) is a group of Healthcare Professionals and Scientists based at Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust and Imperial College London who aim to improve joint health.
About us
The IJUMP group is a multidisciplinary group of Healthcare Professionals and Scientists based at Imperial College London NHS Healthcare Trust and Imperial College London with a collective interest in research to improve the health of joints.
The Imperial Joint health group aim to:
- Understand more about promoting joint health and preventing damage by studying markers and processes associated with joint health and joint damage.
- Monitor changes that occur within the joint after an injury or in osteoarthritis, to develop tests that will help identify the right treatments for individuals in trials and the clinic.
- Prevent osteoarthritis by using our findings to develop new treatments to prevent or slow the progression of osteoarthritis in joints.
We have a particular research focus on injuries that involve the knee joint, as a high-risk group for issues with knee health. We also focus on research with people with knee osteoarthritis of all stages.
We work with research participants in both outpatient and inpatient settings – this is sometimes at the time of planned orthopaedic surgery like a total knee replacement, key hole surgery or ligament reconstruction, or in an outpatient appointment following a knee injury.
To read more about the types of research that we do and our studies, please look at the research areas and relevant study web pages. To hear more about our research or to register interest in helping us to develop, deliver or participate in research in this area, please see our IJUMP registry page.
All the information, biological samples and data that we collect are completely anonymised and you will never be able to be identified from these samples. To read more information about the data we collect and store on our studies, please see the relevant study webpage.
Meet the team
- Professor Rajarshi Bhattacharya
- Mr Gareth G. Jones
- Mr Alex Liddle
- Mr Dinesh Nathwani
- Miss Lidia Nigrelli
- Mr Rhidian Thomas
- Dr Fiona E. Watt
Professor Rajarshi B
hattacharya has been a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHNT) since 2010 and is a Professor of Practice at Imperial College London. He is also the Clinical Director for the North West London Major Trauma Centre and is the Divisional Director of Surgery at ICHNT.
Professor Bhattacharya completed his basic surgical training in the North of England and completed a Master's degree in evidence-based Orthopaedics. He then undertook higher training as a specialist registrar in Trauma and Orthopaedics. His specialist training fellowships were in knee surgery (Edinburgh and Southampton Knee Units) and trauma (Edinburgh Trauma Unit).
His areas of interest include all aspects of knee surgery including partial and total knee joint replacements (with robotic-assisted techniques), minimally invasive surgery, acute orthopaedic injuries and trauma and, soft tissue and ligament reconstructions of the knee.
Find out more on the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust website
Mr Jones is a founding member of the North West Thames Revision Knee Unit which is involved in challenging clinical cases referred from across London. His four main areas of clinical focus are sports injuries, early arthritis treatment, knee conserving joint replacement surgery, and revision knee replacement surgery.
His research is on developing and testing advanced technologies to improve outcomes after knee surgery.
Mr Alex Liddle is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon and Clinical Associate Professor in Orthopaedic Surgery at Imperial College London. He gained his Medical qualification at Imperial College London and then undertook a PhD at the University of Oxford as an Arthritis Research UK and Royal College of Surgeons Research Fellow. As a Specialist Registrar in Orthopaedic surgery, he later gained a Fellowship in Knee Surgery at Oxford University Hospitals. Upon completion, he was appointed as a Consultant in the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Mr Liddle specialises in all aspects of knee and hip surgery including arthroscopic surgery, partial, primary and revision knee replacement, hip replacement, and the treatment of fractures around the hip and knee.
His principal research interest is using technology and ‘big data’ to optimise outcomes and minimise complications after joint replacement. He aims to translate the best of new technologies and evidence-based interventions from research to patient care to provide safer and more effective surgery.
Mr Dinesh Nathwani is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. He graduated from Sheffield University Medical School and then completed fellowships in Computer Assisted Surgery and in ligament reconstruction and knee replacement. He has been a consultant in Trauma and Orthopaedics since 2004 and has pioneered the use of navigation and robotic knee replacement techniques, as well as implant design for knee replacements in the UK.
Mr Nathwani is the Clinical Reference Group Sector Lead for Trauma & Orthopaedics for North West London and is Co-chair of the Musculoskeletal Clinical Network Group. He is also the current President of the UK Society for Computer-Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery. His areas of clinical expertise include knee reconstruction, sports injuries, computer assisted knee surgery, bone-conserving joint replacements and complex lower limb trauma reconstructions.
Mr Nathwani’s research interests are focussed on continuing the development of knee reconstruction using Computer Aided techniques and he sits on a number of development panels to advance the use of this technology.
Lidia Nigrelli is a Research Assistant working at Imperial College London and in the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. She completed an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Science from the University of Sussex and a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Westminster.
Lidia has previously worked in a research team that worked with a birth cohort study to understand the factors that affect ageing, health and the development of disease and, a COVID-19 study that was set up during the pandemic to understand more about long-COVID and recovery after a COVID-19 infection.
Currently, she works with the IJUMP team and our study participants to collect biological samples for the i-Bank study and to support the IJUMP registry. In the future this work will enable us to find new biomarkers relevant to knee joint injury, early osteoarthritis and clinical outcomes.
Mr Rhidian Thomas is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. He graduated from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School, then completed a Sports Medicine Fellowship at Duke University, USA and was appointed as a Consultant in 1998. Mr Thomas is a Founding Fellow of the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine UK and he helped to establish the training programme for Sports and Exercise Medicine in the London Deanery, where he was also the training programme director for many years. He is the current President of the British Orthopaedic and Sports Trauma and Arthroscopy Association.
Mr Thomas holds a Master of Surgery Higher Degree in Knee Reconstruction Surgery and he specialises in foot surgery, knee and ankle injuries, ligament reconstruction, trauma surgery, sports injuries, overuse injuries, and arthroscopic surgery.
Mr Thomas is also a member of the International Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) study group, and he has published work about knee and ankle related problems.
Dr Fiona Watt is a Clinical Associate Professor in Rheumatology at Imperial College London and an Honorary Consultant Rheumatologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Her BMedSci and Medical degrees were from University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She went on to complete a PhD in Cartilage Biochemistry at Imperial College London. She completed her specialist training in Rheumatology in West London and became a Consultant in 2009.
Dr Watt’s clinical and research interests are in high-risk groups for osteoarthritis. Her research focus is on the factors that predict outcome in these groups, such as individuals who have had a clinically significant knee injury or in post-menopausal females, and the related development of new tests and new treatments for osteoarthritis. In 2019, Dr Watt was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for her work exploring predictive biomarkers after joint injury and she also led the Versus Arthritis Musculoskeletal Disorders Research Advisory Group between 2019 and 2022. She is currently the co-lead of the Musculoskeletal Conditions workstream of the NIHR Musculoskeletal Translational Research Collaboration to help develop experimental medicine in this area.
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