Naomi Allen, Professor of Epidemiology

15 minutes with Naomi Allen 

The ’15 minutes with…’ blog series aims to provide a glimpse into the career paths and personal lives of the researchers and employees in our department and showcase the wide range of roles and science conducted. In this blog series, we ask researchers, non-research staff and students, nominated by the students themselves, to reflect on their career to date – their proudest accomplishments and their lowest points – and how they came to be where they are today.

We will publish on a regular basis in the coming months – we hope you will enjoy it.

Today, we continue this series with an interview featuring Naomi Allen, Professor of Epidemiology. 

Could you describe your current role in one sentence?

I’m the Chief Scientist for the UK Biobank study and my main responsibility is to coordinate the follow-up of all half-million participants in the cohort to their health records. At the moment, we link to death, cancer, hospitalisations, primary care, and other health-related datasets and process them to make them available to researchers. In addition, I help to think about the future scientific strategy of the resource to enable the research community to make important scientific discoveries. What new assays can we measure? What new devices can we use to collect other phenotype data on the participants? What questionnaires can we use to make their resource even more valuable for future research? That’s my job in a nutshell.

 What is your favourite thing about it?  

What’s great about this job is that I get to work with a team who are absolutely 100% committed to the project and working in that kind of quite intense team environment is hugely satisfying. I also get to meet lots of people outside my particular research area. I’m a cancer epidemiologist by training but I get to meet people who are experts in genetics, imaging, physical activity, bioinformatics, etc. It’s a privilege to see the cutting edge of research across a broad spectrum of areas, not just within the comfort zone of my own field.

...and what is your least favourite thing about it?

Pre-COVID I would have said travel. Spending time in airports doesn’t particularly fill me with glee, it’s hugely inefficient and I’m not good at jetlag. So, silver linings and all that, one good thing about the COVID pandemic (although we are all stuck at home) is that I see fewer airplanes and hotel rooms.

Moving on to the science, could you tell us about what science you’re most excited about or interested in in your own work?

I’m pretty excited about using the UK Biobank data to explore in much more detail the relationship between adiposity and metabolic disturbances in relation to cancer. This is because, before the UK Biobank study, we generally relied on BMI and waist circumference as crude measures of adiposity. UK Biobank contains MRI and DEXA scans that contain much more detailed information on body fat composition (both visceral fat around the organs and subcutaneous fat), and body fat distribution. So for the first time we will be able to investigate the different role of visceral vs subcutaneous fat in relation to cancer risk. For me that’s a particularly interesting and exciting area because we know that adiposity is big risk factor for many cancer types.

And what about the science that you’re most interested in beyond your own work?

Well there’s lots of things! I would say the biggest advancement is the use of polygenic risk scores. This has really come about through the UK Biobank data which has detailed data on genetic variants across the genome on all half a million people.

There’s now research coming out showing, for example, that people in the top 5% of a polygenic risk score have a three-fold risk of developing heart disease. Each genetic variant represents a small increase in risk but if you put them all together it’s almost the same risk as you get for monogenic diseases like cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s, which really changes the way you think about chronic disease.

We tend to think that heart disease is caused by smoking, a bad diet and high blood pressure. If you take into account all of your genetic variants across your genome, some unlucky people unfortunately have enough of those bad variants when combined to give them a significantly increased risk of developing heart disease. This could be important for the future because it means that if everybody in clinical practice had their genome measured, you can imagine a future where preventative measures, treatment, and/or screening programmes are targeted to subgroups of the population that are genetically predisposed to developing disease.

What’s the thing that you are most proud of in your professional life?

Being honest I’d have to say it was getting through my MSc; I was sleeping on the floor of my sister’s flat in London, I had no money, I had some health issues at the time that I couldn’t get to the bottom of and the course (I was at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) was difficult and a huge commitment. So it was a really difficult year but quitting just wasn’t an option for me. Getting through that year and having that piece of paper at the end that said I had passed the MSc was by far my biggest achievement from a personal point of view and everything from then kind of flowed so I’m really glad I stuck with it.

And your biggest failure or disappointment?

This is an easy one. A small team of us worked for about three years to put together a grant application to measure blood levels of infectious disease markers for all UK Biobank participants. We developed and validated the technology, put together what we thought was a very strong application, which got rejected, not once but twice, despite receiving good reviews. It was disappointing and I think a huge scientific opportunity was lost.

Could you outline your route to where you are today?  

I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was younger. When I went off to university I was a really strong environmentalist – I was into Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, wanted to save the world from climate change. So I went to study Environmental Science at university and I hated it – apart from one module in epidemiology and public health, which I really enjoyed. There was a recession when I graduated and I drifted from one awful job to another.

After about 18 months, I thought I’ve really got to change something so I decided to do the MSc at the London School because it was the only thing that I was really interested in. But even then, I really still didn’t have a clear idea about what it was all about or whether it would lead to anywhere. I had no clear direction about what I wanted to do – I just knew I had to change something in my life. So yeah I slept on a mattress in the corner of my sister’s freezing flat for a year and worked very hard. Then things just fell into place. I fell in love with the subject, the people were fantastic, everyone was like-minded, it was a really strong close-knit community and it felt like really important research. I’ve never looked back and knew it was something I wanted to do.

Could you tell us one thing about you outside work?

I try to swim every morning when I possibly can. I’m up at the crack of dawn and I’ll be the first in the pool with all the old grannies. It keeps me sane. If I don’t do that I’ll get kind of grumpy.

If you could give an advice to your 18-year-old self, what would that be? 

This is a really tough one! I would advise myself to have a bit more confidence and to not think that you’re not good enough, smart enough or from the right background. And don’t let people put you in a box and label you, particularly if you are a young woman. That’s still pretty common. Don’t limit your own expectations of yourself.

Thank you so much!

Naomi is a Professor of Epidemiology, based in the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit.