Professor Ailsa Hart is Director of St Mark’s Hospital Inflammatory Bowel Disease Research and Consultant Gastroenterologist. She was previously the Dean of St Mark’s Hospital Academic Institute. In 2016, she achieved academic promotion with Imperial College to Professor of Practice, and is among the youngest individuals to achieve this. She is Honorary Skou Professor (created in honour of the Nobel Laureate, Professor Jens Skou, to recognise internationally esteemed researchers) with the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Professor Ailsa Hart studied medicine at Oxford University and was awarded a First Class Honours Degree together with the George Pickering Prize for Medicine and Surgery proxime accessit (awarded for the best overall performance) and multiple prizes for outstanding achievements. She achieved Membership of the Royal College of Physicians and subsequently Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians. She trained in Gastroenterology and General Internal Medicine in London and also received training at the Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam. She achieved her PhD with Imperial College in 2005, funded by a Wellcome Trust Fellowship. She was appointed to the consultant staff of St Mark’s Hospital in 2007, having been awarded a highly competitive Clinical Senior Lectureship by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
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 has published 2 books and over 300 papers. Her h-index is 63.
She has supervised and mentored over 30 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 to the International Organisation for IBD (IOIBD), which is a group of approximately 50 top clinicians globally involved in IBD – she is only one of three members from the UK and the only UK woman involved.
