Adjunct Professor; Department of Surgery & Cancer, Imperial College

Ms Clark is a consultant colorectal surgeon at St Mark’s Hospital. She has a long association with the hospital, starting as a research fellow in the Polyposis Registry just before St Mark’s moved from City Road to Northwick Park. She returned for a year as a senior trainee, and later as a consultant.

During her career at St Mark’s she has led the Polyposis Registry, been active as a researcher and research supervisor, served as Educational Supervisor for surgical trainees; she was Dean of the St Mark’s Academic Institute 2014-9 and President of the St Mark’s Association 2021-1. Roles outside the hospital include Member of Royal College of Surgeons of England Commission on the Future of Surgery (2017-18), Senior Editor of Colorectal Disease, Chair of the Grants Committee of Bowel Research UK and President of the Section of Coloproctology of the Royal Society of Medicine (2020-21).

Ms Clark trained in medicine at Cambridge University and St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London. She embarked on specialist training in obstetrics and gynaecology, but after two years switched to general and colorectal surgery.

She spent two years in full time research at St. Mark’s Hospital with an Imperial Cancer Research Fund Fellowship. She was based in the Polyposis Registry and worked on various clinical aspects of desmoid disease in familial adenomatous polyposis as well as studying the genetic changes within these rare tumours. The resulting MD thesis won the Raymond Horton-Smith Prize for the best thesis of the year at Cambridge University, and won the Leeds Castle Polyposis Group Young Investigator Award.

She completed her surgical training in the South West Thames Region, at St Mark’s Hospital and at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. She then spent three years as a consultant at the Royal London Hospital before returning to St Mark’s. During this time she set up a family cancer clinic to provide services for inherited or potentially inherited colorectal cancer in the North East London Cancer Network. Her practice covers most aspects of colorectal and anal surgery. Her main sub-specialist area of expertise is in inherited colorectal cancer syndromes.

She tries desperately to keep fit – and ran the Royal Parks half marathon 2021 for the St Mark’s Foundation.