The Medicom Podcast Channel includes summaries of articles presented at the major international medical conferences, presented by our Medical Science Officer Dr Rachel Giles.
Dr Giles studied immunology and medicine at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Francisco (USA) where she graduated in 1990. After working in labs in Israel and Japan, she accepted a PhD project in Leiden, the Netherlands, on the genetic factors that contribute to leukaemia and the developmental disorder Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome under the supervision of Professors Martijn Breuning and Gert-Jan van Ommen. She was awarded her PhD cum laude in 1998 from the University of Leiden.
During her PhD studies, Dr Giles freelanced as a medical writer for Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Molecular Medicine Today, and for Novartis. After graduating, she then worked on a clinical project improving the diagnosis of leukaemia at Leiden University Medical Center. In 2000, she accepted a post-doctoral position in the Dept. of Immmunology at the University Medical Center Utrecht, and at the Hubrecht Institute, the Netherlands, in the lab of Prof. Hans Clevers, studying colorectal cancer, with the ultimate aim to translate clinical problems to novel therapeutic targets. In 2003, she became Assistant Professor in the Dept. Medical Oncology at the UMC Utrecht (Prof. Voest), and was promoted to Associate Professor of Internal Medicine in 2006. Her clinical and fundamental research on kidney cancer is recognised internationally. During these years she continued freelance medical writing for journals (she was offered the Editor-in-chief position at the EMBO Journal in 2006) and various pharmaceutical companies.
In 2009-2010, Dr Giles was a Visiting Professor at Genentech in South San Francisco, where she joined the lab of Prof. Peter Jackson. She returned to the UMC Utrecht at the end of 2010, where she became Associate Professor of Nephrology (Prof. Verhaar) and turned her attention to fibrotic diseases. Dr Giles has co-authored 119 peer-reviewed papers, has served as senior editor for four journals, and has been awarded grants and prizes for her work. She is fully certified to teach Medical School. In addition to her academic career, Dr Giles has extensive experience communicating medical advances to various stakeholders, such as preparing immuno-oncology information for the European Society for Medical Oncology.
In 2019 she joined Medicom Medical Publishers as Senior Medical Writer and Editor for the Medicom Round-Up series in medicine.
