Arani Vivekanantham

Arani is an NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow and DPhil candidate in Musculoskeletal Sciences. She is interested in using real world data to answer clinically relevant questions to improve the care and lives for people living with psoriatic arthritis. She is working with Professor Dani Prieto Alhambra and Professor Laura Coates within NDORMS. Her current research work aims to investigate which people with psoriasis develop psoriatic arthritis with the aim to develop a prediction model that can be used in primary care to support early diagnosis and treatment of people with psoriatic arthritis. She also aims to look at the safety of the first line treatments used in people with psoriatic arthritis and the impact that other underlying co-morbidities may have in development of side-effects from these.

Alongside this, Arani holds a number of academic clinical leadership positions. She is the Networking group leader for the Young-Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (Y-GRAPPA) and part of the Emerging EULAR Network (EMEUNET) sub-committee. She is also the Oxford representative for the UK Research in Musculoskeletal Epidemiology (UK-RiME) national collaboration.

Prior to starting her DPhil, Arani completed an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship, and a pilot research grant awarded by the Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (GRAPPA) at NDORMS. During this time, she also completed the first two years of her specialist training in Rheumatology at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford University Hospitals. She studied undergraduate medicine at Keele University Medical School, where she also undertook an intercalated Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree at the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre. Following this, Arani completed the Academic Foundation Programme at the University of Warwick and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire. She then became an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow in Rheumatology at the University of Manchester and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, where she completed her Core Medical Training.