About me
Dr. Steven Okoli - Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer, Department of Immunology and Inflammation - Faculty of Medicine, Commonwealth Building, Hammersmith Campus, United Kingdom
Dr Okoli completed his haematology training in South West London, based mainly at Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals. He then embarked on a Research Fellowship in rare anaemias at the Weatherall Institute, Oxford. This project identified patients, in an international collaboration, with unexplained non-spherocytic haemolytic anaemias. These cases were evaluated using the rare anaemias next generation sequencing panel together with deep phenotyping, and these data were recorded on a purpose-built database to identify genotype-phenotype correlations.
Following this, Dr Okoli undertook several posts as a red cell haematology consultant at large teaching hospitals in south London. In 2016, he joined Imperial College, London as a clinical research fellow. In this role, he completed a PhD investigating the epigenetic mechanism by which histone deacetylase inhibitors selectively induce G6PD activity, and whether this novel approach could be used to develop a treatment for the disease.
On completion of his PhD, Dr Okoli was appointed to his current roles as an honorary senior clinical lecturer, at Imperial College, and consultant Haematologist, at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. His main areas of practice are in sickle cell disease, thalassaemia and rare anaemias. He is the sub-specialty lead for the North West London NIHR Clinical Research Network, and is principal investigator for several clinical studies including: the NIHR BioResource Rare Disease programme, INHERENT (an international collaboration that aims to identify genetic modifiers of haemoglobinopathies), and several early phase clinical trials of novel therapies in the treatment of sickle cell disease. He is also the adult stem cell transplant lead for sickle cell disease at Imperial College NHS Trust.
Dr Okoli has a particular interest in education and, in his role as an honorary clinical lecturer, he teaches on the Haematology BSc course based at Imperial College, London. His other activities include, leading the Imperial College sickle cell group and is medical advisor for the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust.