DrNatalie Shenker

Dr Natalie Shenker MBE initially trained in paediatric surgery with posts in Australia, Guys and St Thomas's, Oxford and Great Ormond Street. She completed her PhD in 2015 in the Epigenetics Unit at Imperial, where she focussed on DNA methylation signatures of cancer risk and environmental exposures. She co-published the first genome-wide signature of smoking exposure and developed a methylation index that can reliably determine former smoking. Through a collaboration with a hospital-based human milk bank, she further developed a protocol to use epithelial cells derived from breast milk as a resource in which cell-specific epigenetic changes can be assessed, with the potential to development cancer risk prediction tools.

Having recognised the potential for this clinical service in infant and maternal health, Dr Shenker established the UK's first community-based human milk bank, the Hearts Milk Bank in 2017 in partnership with Gillian Weaver. Gillian and Natalie were awarded MBEs in the Kings Birthday Honours List in 2022 for services to charity and human milk banking. Hearts is now the largest human milk bank in the country, supporting scores of NHS trusts, hundreds of families in the community who are currently ineligible for access to donor milk through the NHS, and facilitates much-needed research in the field.

Her work in cancer research has continuned through the establishment of a nationwide prospective population cohort study, the Breastmilk Epigenetic Cohort Study (BECS), which aims to recruit milk samples from several thousand women. Dr Shenker has supervised over 30 PhD, MSc and MBBS students - current projects include epithelial cell mutational analysis, understanding the implications for public health messaging around breastfeeding and cancer risk reduction, optimal microbiological screening and human milk processing, and operational modeling/costing of future donor human milk demand.

Dr Shenker has developed collaborations between numerous research groups across the UK and internationally. She is a former Trustee of the UK Association for Milk Banking, cofounder of the Human Milk Foundation, and cofounder of the Global Alliance for Milk Banks and Associations.