Dr Ali Al-Hadithi
- BHF Clinical Research Training Fellow
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About
Ali Al-Hadithi is a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Clinical Research Training Fellow undertaking a PhD in Medicine at the University of Cambridge (Queens’ college). He previously completed an Academic Clinical Fellowship (ACF) in Cardiology and Internal Medicine with the University of Cambridge.
Ali completed his undergraduate and clinical training at the University of Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College), where he received multiple awards for academic excellence. After completing his foundation programme training in the East of England region, he continued with academic clinical training in Cambridge before proceeding to a PhD programme during Cardiology training.
His research has led to multiple peer-reviewed publications, including in the areas of inflammation, arrhythmias, heart failure and cardiovascular risk. He has been awarded numerous prizes throughout his training, including the Royal Society of Medicine Harvey Prize.
Ali is heavily involved in medical education and has developed numerous teaching materials, including award-winning online resources. He is Programme Director of Teach The Dr Teacher, a leading teach the teacher course provider with over 1,500 attendees across 5 continents. He was awarded a Distinction on the University of Cambridge Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Education, and was invited to complete the University of Cambridge Integrated Foundations of Medical Education in 2019, leading to AFHEA. He has been a University of Cambridge clinical supervisor since 2019. He is a lead editor for multiple books on electrocardiograms, prescribing and radiology.
Research
Ali’s research focuses on the role of the immune system in cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis. His current work combines single-cell and spatial transcriptomics with protein-level validation to uncover the mechanisms underlying atherosclerosis and inflammatory heart disease. As part of his core research, Ali has set up a two-centre randomised controlled clinical trial investigating the tissue-level effects of low-dose interleukin-2 in cardiac disease.
He has hands-on experience across every stage of clinical research, including study setup, participant recruitment, sample handling and data analysis, which allows him to connect clinical studies directly with mechanistic laboratory work.
Ali has strong data analysis skills, with extensive experience in Python and R. He applies these to large-scale single-cell and spatial transcriptomic datasets as well as clinical study data.
His earlier research ranged from basic science to clinically focussed studies, including work on heart failure and cardiac cachexia, the role of GDF15 (a marker of cellular stress) and the integrated stress response, using genetic mouse models, immunofluorescence, qPCR and RNAscope single-molecule in situ hybridisation.
