Miss Tracy Higgins is the Manager of the NIHR Biomedical Research Unit in Respiratory Disease at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College London (BRU), and Project Manager for the UK Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium (Consortium). Tracy trained as an Administration Manager and in 2000 joined Imperial College as the Laboratory Manager for the Gene Therapy Group, becoming the Consortium's Project Manager in 2006. In 2008 the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College were awarded BRU status for their Respiratory and Cardiovascular programmes and Tracy has been the Respiratory BRU Manager since then. Tracy's responsibilities include extensive financial management and contracting across numerous stakeholders, setting up and overseeing core facilities, running internal funding competitions, coordinating multi-centre grant submissions and linking the BRU nationwide with other NIHR infrastructure. Recently Tracy became the first Chair of the NIHR National BRC/U Managers Working Group, the aim of which is to bring together managers from the BRCs and BRUs to identify common challenges and initiate work packages to deliver solutions for those challenges. Tracy also Chairs the NIHR National BRC/U Patient and Public Involvement /Engagement Group

Biomedical Research, Cystic fibrosis