Sonya Abraham

Dr. Abraham is a general physician and rheumatologist. Her clinical interests include inflammatory arthritis namely psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis.

Dr. Abraham has been a consultant physician at Imperial and is the current Head of Clinical and Scientific strategic planning and process at UCB Celltech, which she joined in 2018 as Medical Director, Head of New Treatment Strategies Immunology.

She is an expert in the early diagnosis and treatment of these conditions. Additionally, she has expertise in treating patients whose disease remains active despite conventional disease modifying medication including biologics. Her clinical research interests help to inform her decision making in helping to tailor and monitor response to treatments using clinical, biochemical and imaging measures

She undertook her medical training in London, Oxford and Cambridge.

She was a Clinical Lecturer at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and undertook her PhD, as a Wellcome Clinical Training Fellow, examining the effect of glucocorticoids on pro-inflammatory intracellular signalling.

Her novel finding was that a Dual Specificity Phosphatase (DUSP1) renders partial glucocorticoid resistance (J Exp Med 2006).

Dr. Abraham has successfully co-supervised MD and clinical PhD students in experimental translational inflammatory arthritis. These students presented their work at international meetings and have been awarded prestigious prizes.

She has been the Rheumatology academic clinical fellow (ACF) lead at Imperial and successfully facilitated the creation of the first ACF in London. She was also Lead for Undergraduate Year 5 Rheumatology education at Imperial and an Arthritis Research UK student mentor.

She has been awarded grants from STeLi for “Patient-centric Education” and “Joint examination and injection simulation education”.

Additionally, she is engaged in a number of Public and Patient engagement initiatives to help understanding the needs and value of biomedical research.

Dr. Abraham is committed to nurturing and supporting future academic rheumatologists and training future clinical rheumatologists to help lead/support clinical research.