Dr. Bowerman is a Lecturer in Bioscience at the School of Medicine at Keele University, a group Member of the Wolfson Centre for Inherited Neuromuscular Disease in Oswestry and a principal investigator in the UK SMA Research Consortium.

Dr Bowerman completed her Ph.D. (2006-2012) in Dr Rashmi Kothary’s laboratory (Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI)/University of Ottawa, Canada) where she held a CIHR Frederick Banting and Charles Best doctoral award and received the OHRI Dr. Ronald G. Worton Researcher in Training Award. Dr. Bowerman then joined Dr. Cedric Raoul’s laboratory at the Institut des Neurosciences de Montpellier in France as an EMBO Long-Term Fellow (2012-2014). From 2014-2016, Dr. Bowerman was a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford in Professor Matthew Wood’s group. In October 2015, Dr. Bowerman was the recipient of a Junior Research Fellowship at Somerville College, University of Oxford (2015-2017). In January 2016, Dr. Bowerman was awarded and SMA Trust Career Development Fellowship at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Bowerman’s current research interests are on identifying pathological players in skeletal muscle and other metabolic tissues and evaluate how they mediate and exacerbate muscle pathology and metabolic defects in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Importantly, a key feature of her work is to develop novel therapeutic approaches (using omics, bioinformatics and drug repurposing strategies) that can be used in combination with clinically relevant SMN gene-based therapies.

For further information on Dr. Bowerman’s research and public engagement activities: https://www.thebowermanlab.com/.

Read Dr. Bowerman’s blog for the NMD4C here: https://neuromuscularnetwork.ca/dr-melissa-bowermans-blog/.