Professor Ailsa Hart trained in medicine at Oxford University and was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in 1992 and the George Pickering Prize for Medicine and Surgery Proxime Accessit in 1995 and prizes for outstanding achievements. She achieved Membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1998 and trained in Gastroenterology and General Internal Medicine in London. She also worked at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam in 2004. She achieved her PhD in 2005 with Imperial College, London funded by a Wellcome Trust Fellowship. She became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2013.

She was appointed to the consultant staff of St Mark’s Hospital in 2008 and became a Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London, having been awarded a highly competitive Clinical Senior Lectureship by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. She has designed and led the renowned IBD service at St Mark’s, which has around 14000 patients. She became one of the youngest ever to be awarded the title of Professor of Practice at Imperial College London. She is also Honorary Skou Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, a prestigious appointment.

Her clinical work centres on inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis. She is credited for “putting St Mark’s on the global map” for IBD and being a “brilliant advocate for British IBD”. At an early stage in her consultant career, she was made Director of St Mark’s Hospital IBD Unit, and alongside an excellent team has developed and delivered a world-class clinical service with joint medical/ surgical clinics, new diagnosis clinics, biologics/ advanced therapy clinics and a psychological medicine unit for IBD.

She interdigitates a busy clinical practice with research. Her research interests demonstrate breadth and depth from basic science (understanding intestinal immunology and microbiology) to holistic care of IBD. She is Co-Director of a global consortium, TOp Class (Treatment Optimisation and Classification) for perianal Crohn’s disease, publishing a new classification for this challenging phenotype of IBD. She conducted among the first trials of faecal transplantation in IBD and has an ongoing research interest in the gut microbiome. She has a long-lasting collaboration aiming to optimise colorectal cancer surveillance for IBD patients, using the St Mark’s largest and longest running database as the backbone for the research. She has been gastroenterology lead for the IBD BOOST programme, which is developing psychological therapies for fatigue, pain and continence issues in IBD.

She is involved in teaching and training both nationally and internationally and has lectured by invitation at over 500 meetings. Her research work led to the publishing of two books, with “Inflammatory Bowel Disease – an Evidence-based Practical Guide” being a best seller. She has also published over 400 papers and book chapters and has an h-index of >80. She is a member of national and international IBD committees and consensus groups.

She has supervised and mentored over 40 higher degree students, many of whom are now directing their own IBD units. She lectures widely nationally and internationally. She has delivered the Sir Arthur Hurst Lecture, the highest accolade bestowed by the BSG, and has been Visiting Professor in Australia, USA, Canada, India, UAE, Africa, Scandinavia and Europe.

She has contributed to national (British Society of Gastroenterology) and international societies (European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation for over 10 years, serving on its Governing Board for 6 years; United European Gastroenterology Faculty; and the International Organisation of IBD) throughout her consultant career. She has been Chair of the BSG Gut Microbiota for Health Group; Member of the IBD Clinical Research Group Committee for the BSG; Member of the Clinical Committee of the ECCO; Treasurer of ECCO; Scientific Officer of ECCO (steering through the pandemic years); author of BSG and ECCO guidelines; Editorial Board of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics and Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis; UK Patient and Public Involvement & Engagement Lead for Gastroenterology; Research Committee Member and patient information writer for the Crohn’s and Colitis UK charity. She was elected onto the International Organisation for the study of IBD (IOIBD) in 2014. The IOIBD, whose aim is to promote the health of those with IBD worldwide, is the only international organisation dedicated to the study of these illnesses. The IOIBD’s mission statement is to “promote the health of people with IBD worldwide by setting the direction for patient care, education and research.” This is a highly prestigious appointment, as only 50 physicians and surgeons worldwide have been elected on to this organisation.

She has recently been recognised by Tatler as one of the Top Gastroenterologists.