Dr Zainab Rai is an Academic Surgical Registrar in General Surgery with a specialist interest in hepatopancreatobiliary (HPB) surgery and pancreatic cancer. She has recently submitted her PhD thesis at University College London (UCL), where her research focused on the mechanisms of irreversible electroporation (IRE) in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma using ex vivo perfused human organs, advanced MRI techniques and complementary in vitro models.
Dr Rai is a Pancreatic Cancer UK Early Career Fellow and a former Royal College of Surgeons of England Research Fellow. Her work combines surgical innovation, bioengineering and translational cancer research to investigate treatment response and develop clinically relevant preclinical models. Alongside her research, she is pursuing higher surgical training with the goal of becoming an academic HPB surgeon specialising in pancreatic cancer.
She has secured competitive research funding from Pancreatic Cancer UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) to support her research programme and has presented her work at national and international scientific meetings. She is committed to developing innovative translational models and image-guided therapies to improve outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer.