Dr Rafia Al-Lamki is a Senior Clinical Scientist at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge. She holds an MPhil/PhD in Cellular Pathology from Fitzwilliam College and is a Fellow and Tutor at St Edmund’s College. She was a recipient of several scholarships and received a training fellowship from the World Health Organisation and a bursary from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. She has extensive experience in cellular, molecular, and structural biology and her research focuses on examining the effect of proinflammatory mediator tumour necrosis factor in renal and cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

She developed a human organ culture model to gain insights into the molecular mechanisms of these conditions which has led to novel findings published in reputable scientific journals and a patent invention. She has consulted for Glaxo SmithKline and Immutrin, is an active participant in the Yale-Cambridge-AstraZeneca collaboration and is currently on secondment at Yale School of Medicine examining the effect of gluten on celiac disease. She has authored a book titled ‘The TNF Superfamily’. Rafia self-raised £70,000 to fund her studies at Cambridge.

She is fluent in English and Kiswahili and understands Arabic.