Summary
Dr Sophie V Morse started her own group in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial in 2022 as an Imperial College Research Fellow and is looking for keen undergraduate, master and PhD students to join her lab.
Her group is looks at how focused ultrasound can non-invasively stimulate cells in our brain, particularly glial cells (that support our neurons) and immune cells, to find new ways of treating Alzheimer's disease, brain tumours and even slow down ageing.
She graduated with a Masters in Engineering from Imperial College in 2015 (Bioengineering) and joined the CDT in Medical Imaging for her MRes (King's College) and then PhD as part of the Noninvasive Surgery & Biopsy Laboratory (www.nsblab.org). Here, she developed ways to improve the delivery of drugs to the brain using focused ultrasound and microbubbles. This is a local, reversible and noninvasive technique which can help in the diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases.
She received an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship in 2020 to deliver a novel drug to the brain with focused ultrasound for Alzheimer's disease and then spent a year in the Department of Brain Sciences working on novel metabolic treatments for brain tumours (funded by the Brain Tumour Charity). In 2022 she was awarded an Imperial College Research Fellowship to start her own research group. She has since become a European Talent Academy Fellow and an Emerging Leader in the Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College (2023).
- AWARDS
- 2023 - Engineering and Technology Lecture Award - British Science Festival
- 2022 - Top 50 Women in Engineering (WE50) Award - Inventors and Innovators
- 2021 - Young Investigator Award from European Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology
- 2021 - William James Award from Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET)
- 2021 - Best published paper prize from European Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology
- 2020 - Young Investigator Award from British Medical Ultrasound Society
- 2019 - Gold Medal in Engineering and Westminster Award (overall winner) at STEM for Britain in the UK Parliament.
- 2019 - Won competition on Image-guided therapy at EU Symposium on Ultrasound Contrast Imaging in Rotterdam, Netherlands
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Morse SV, Boltersdorf T, Harriss BI, et al., 2020, Neuron labeling with rhodamine-conjugated Gd-based MRI contrast agents delivered to the brain via focused ultrasound, Theranostics, Vol:10, ISSN:1838-7640, Pages:2659-2674
Morse SV, Pouliopoulos AN, Chan TG, et al., 2019, Rapid short-pulse ultrasound delivers drugs uniformly across the murine blood-brain barrier with negligible disruption, Radiology, Vol:291, ISSN:0033-8419, Pages:459-466
Chan T, Morse S, Copping M, et al., 2018, Targeted delivery of DNA-Au nanoparticles across the blood-brain barrier using focused ultrasound, Chemmedchem, Vol:13, ISSN:1860-7187, Pages:1311-1314