The Team

Mr Yacoub Khalaf MD MRCOG.
Director of the Assisted Conception Unit and HFEA Person Responsible
Special interests: Gynaecology, sub-specialist in reproductive medicine, sub-fertility, assisted reproduction, minimal access and fibroid and endometriosis surgery, early pregnancy and gynaecology scanning including tubal assessment and non-surgical cannulation, surgical sperm retrieval.

Professor Peter Braude BSc MB BCh MA PhD FRCOG DPMSA FMedSci
Director of the Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis Programme
Peter Braude is Head of the Department of Women's Health at King's College London and consultant in our assisted conception unit. He directs our Centre for Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis, which is the most active and successful of the licensed programmes in the UK. The team recently won the Hospital Doctor award for Innovation for development of Preimplantation Genetic Haplotyping a new technique in PGD. During his 16 years in Cambridge before coming to London, he lead one of the first groups to be funded by the Medical Research Council to carry out research using human embryos fertilised in vitro, towards an understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms operating at these early stages of development. His research group at King's established the first human embryonic stem cell lines in the UK and was the first internationally to derive a stem cell line containing the common F508 mutation for cystic fibrosis. He has published widely on the science and ethics of these emerging techniques and hold grants from the MRC, Wellcome Foundation and other research charities. He is a former member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and currently chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Dr Jan Grace BSc MBBS MRCOG.
Consultant
Special interests: Gynaecology, sub-specialist in reproductive medicine, sub-fertility, assisted reproduction, minimal access and fibroid surgery, early pregnancy and gynaecology scanning including tubal assessment, psychosexual medicine

Dr Virginia Bolton MA PhD
Consultant Embryologist
Virginia Bolton read Zoology at St Hilda's College, Oxford, following which she was awarded a PhD for her thesis on the molecular biology of mouse embryogenesis from the University of Cambridge. This was followed by an MRC-funded post-doctoral research position at Cambridge, under the direction of Peter Braude, during which she investigated characteristics of human spermatozoa associated with fertilisiing capacity, using in vitro fertilisation of donated human oocytes. Their research investigating the development of the resulting human embryos led to the publication in Nature of an article describing the time at which embryonic genes first become active during early human develoment. Following this post-doctoral appointment, Dr Bolton took the position of Senior, then Consultant Embryologist at King's College Hospital, London. She joined the Assisted Conception Unit and PGD team at Guy's Hospital, as Consultant Embryologist, in November 2004.