University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Professor Shakila Thangaratinam is Dame Hilda Lloyd Chair of Maternal and Perinatal Health at the University of Birmingham, and leads the Maternal and Reproductive Health Theme (Jan 2020-). She is the co-Director of WHO Collaborating Centre for Global Women’s Health and academic lead for Women’s Health in Birmingham Health Partners. As Consultant Obstetrician she is involved in the care of high-risk mothers at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
In her previous role as Professor at Queen Mary University of London (2012-2019), Professor Thangaratinam established the Barts Research Centre for Women’s Health (BARC). She established Katie’s Team, a dedicated Patient and Public Involvement group in East London, whose members contribute to NIHR Boards and studies. More recently, she established the Dame Hilda Lloyd Network, which brings together medical and midwifery students and trainees, school students, and senior clinical academics involved in Women’s Health Research in the West Midlands.
To ensure that the views of women in the West Midlands are captured within Professor Thangaratinam’s research at Birmingham, she has established a second Patient and Public Involvement Group named The Hildas. The women in this group are consulted on current research ideas which enables the groups’ research to be collaborative.
Professor Thangaratinam’s work focuses on prediction, prevention and treatment of complications in mothers with pre-eclampsia, epilepsy, diabetes, and obesity. She leads large global collaborative networks such as the NIHR-funded International Weight Management in Pregnancy (i-WIP) collaborative group (40 researchers, 16 countries, >50,000 women), with the largest live repository of individual data and the IPPIC (International Prediction of Complications in Pregnancy) collaborative network (73 collaborators, 21 countries, >5 million pregnancies). She has accrued research income of over £20 million, and published in first or last author position in Lancet (2022, 2019, 2015, 2012), BMJ (2022, 2021, 2020, 2017, 2016, 2012, 2011), Lancet Global Health (2017), Lancet Haematology (2021), and multiple HTA monographs. Professor Thangaratinam was awarded the NIHR Senior Investigator Award in March 2021.
