About Us

Our Directors:

Director/Founder Dr Gaia Kiru BSc, MSc, MBA, PhD

Gaia has over 19 years experience of managing all stages of academic and industry clinical trials and studies, both in the UK and internationally. After years of noticing that there was a lack of convenient, engaging and affordable training options for her team, she decided to pull together with Jen and Jess to do something about it. Gaia currently holds the position of Head of Operations and Partnerships at ICTU-Global, an Academic Research Organisation at Imperial College London.

Director Jessica Smith BSc, MSc

Jess has over 10 years’ experience managing and running clinical research trials in both academic and industry settings across a broad range of areas including: paediatric & adult psychiatry, epilepsy, CVD, diabetes, chronic pain, tobacco research and digital interventions. Jess is currently Operations Manager at ICTU-Global at Imperial College London.

Director Dr Jennifer Murphy PhD

Jen is a clinical research professional with 15 years experience of managing national and international academic and industry studies in a range of therapeutic areas. She is committed to providing training which shares practical advice for your day-to-day role from experienced professionals in the field.  Jen joined Imperial College London in 2014 and currently holds the role of Operations Manager at ICTU Global, which involves developing and training a diverse team of clinical research staff. 

Our Experts:

Legal Instructor Natasha Bennett FCILEx

Natasha is a lawyer with 10 years experience working in universities and commercial legal practice. She is a contract specialist who is passionate about ensuring legal documents are appropriate to manage risk but also do not create delays to ground breaking research. Natasha currently works at the UK Dementia Research Institute and also provides consultancy support to universities and UK based start-up companies.

Statistics Instructor Jack Elkes MSc

Jack has over 5 years experience working as a clinical trial statistician and is currently completing his NIHR funded PhD. His research interest is around how to define user engagement to digital mental health interventions in clinical trials. He enjoys teaching and actively seeks out opportunities to further education on clinical trials and share how statistics can be used in medical research. He is currently based at Imperial College London.

Therapeutic Area Instructor - Hypertension Professor Neil Poulter MB/FRCP/FMedSci

Neil is a Professor of Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine and was previously President of the International Society of Hypertension (2016-2018). Neil has published over 650 papers including co-authoring multiple national and international guidelines and has been recognised as one of the top 0.1% most cited researchers. He has played a senior role in several international trials and is currently the Chief Investigator for May Measurement Month, as well as Deputy Director of ICTU-Global at Imperial College London.