MS expert Professor Klaus Schmierer featured on new health and wellbeing podcast
The Blizard Institute's Professor Klaus Schmierer recently featured on a new health and wellbeing podcast to discuss the connection between a healthy lifestyle and good brain health.
Professor Klaus Schmierer
Professor Schmierer is an internationally renowned professor of neurology at the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary University of London, and consultant neurologist at the Royal London Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust.
The episode on which he features is part of the new podcast Bee well with MS produced by award-winning consultant neurologist Dr Agne Straukiene, who leads Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust’s multiple sclerosis (MS) team.
The pair also discuss how an early diagnosis of MS can help people create a personalised treatment plan to help them learn to live with the condition. Professor Schmierer also shares his thoughts on what drives him at work to help improve the quality of life for people with MS.
You don’t have to have MS or be a clinical expert on the condition to tune in – the podcasts are aimed at anyone with an interest in healthcare and looking after themselves, as well as helping people with MS to feel better living with the condition.
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MS has been a focus of Dr Schmierer’s clinical and research activities from the beginning of his training in Neurology at the Charité Hospital (Humboldt University Berlin. In 2001 he moved to London to pursue a career in academic neurology, initially as a Research Fellow, and from 2005 as a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellow at the UCL Institute of Neurology, and a Consultant Neurologist at The National Hospital, Queen Square. Here, he investigated histo-pathological correlates of quantitative MRI using standard and high-field MR systems to improve disease monitoring in people with MS. Following appointments in 2009 at Queen Mary University of London and The Royal London Hospital (Barts Health NHS Trust) his clinical academic work now includes:
- exploring the pathological substrate of disease deterioration in pwMS using MRI and quantitative histology
- studies into the epidemiology and cause(s) of MS/the BartsMS Database
- in vivo MRI studies to improve the differential-diagnosis of MS
- investigator-led and commercial clinical trials.
Research by his group has been supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Wellcome Trust, Barts Charity, the Royal College of Radiologists, UK MS Society, the National MS Society (US), MRC, NIHR and the pharmaceutical industry.
From 2013-15 Dr Schmierer served as a member of the Association of British Neurologists’ MS & Neuroinflammation Specialist Subcommittee which published the latest UK disease modifying treatment guidelines for people with MS. He has been the Deputy Director of the Research & Development Board in the Emergency Care & Acute Medicine Clinical Academic Group of Barts Health NHS Trust. He is the Past-Chair of the White Matter Study Group of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and serves on the MS Society’s Clinical Trials Network, their Consortium for progressive MS, as well as the review board of the MS Register. Dr Schmierer is the sub speciality lead for MS at the NIHR North Thames Clinical Research Network, and acts as an advisor to the EMA, MHRA and NICE on new drugs for MS.