Richard Stratton is a Consultant and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Rheumatology, within the division of medicine at UCL. He is Clinical Lead for Rheumatology at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. After studying medicine at Oxford University, Richard trained in rheumatology at Guy’s Hospital before moving to the Royal Free in 1995.

As a clinical research fellow, he worked with Professor Carol Black and Professor Jeremy Pearson and obtained his MD from King’s College in 1999. He became a visiting research fellow at FibroGen, California under Professor George Martin, studying the regulation of pro-fibrotic growth factors in scleroderma. Subsequently he completed a PhD thesis at UCL and was later appointed as a consultant at the Royal Free. He has continued his research programme into studying the mechanisms underlying fibrosis in scleroderma, focusing on the role of epithelial cells which have a key role in promoting the skin fibrosis in the disease.

His interests are in developing novel strategies to treat fibrosis using scleroderma as a model. Current approaches include evaluating anti-inflammatory peptides, as well as the targeting of enzymes involved in collagen alignment. He also supervises PDRAs, PhD and clinical research fellows in a research group based at UCL Centre for Rheumatology, Royal Free Hospital campus.