Biography
Dunja graduated from the University of Hull in 2004 with a BSc in Biomedical Science as the recipient of the Faculty of Science Academic Scholarship. She was awarded the University of Hull Frederick Atkinson Prize Scholarship and NHS Renal Research Fund Fellowship for her doctoral studies to examine myocardial insulin resistance in chronic kidney disease. In 2008, Dunja joined the University of Oxford and in 2013, she moved to King’s College London, as senior research fellow. In 2017 Dunja was appointed Lecturer in Physiology at Queen Mary University of London. In 2020, she joined William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London as the British Heart Foundation Accelerator Award Fellow. In 2021 she was awarded the Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. Her research aims to determine how metabolic remodelling contributes to the pathophysiology of heart failure and from this develop novel therapies targeting metabolism. To investigate these research areas, she developed techniques which integrate physiology with NMR spectroscopy (23Na, 31P, 13C, 1H) that enable assessment of cardiac metabolism in situ. Work in her laboratory is funded by Diabetes UK, British Heart Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Bart’s Charity and industrial partners.