Lesley Blogg
Lesley runs SLB Consulting, from her home in the north-west of England.
She started her scientific career with an interest in animal exercise physiology, working on the Atlanta Olympic games FEI acclimatisation study with Dr David Marlin at the Animal Health Trust in Newmarket while writing her degree dissertation. She then moved on to Birmingham University where she was awarded a scholarship to study for a PhD investigating the central control of the diving response in birds and mammals.
In 1999, she left animal divers and took a sideways step to humans, working alongside fellow physiologists studying decompression illness and submarine escape and rescue strategies at DERA/QINETIQ in Alverstoke. At this time, she also trained as a hyperbaric paramedic attendant and engineer, and so became familiar with hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO).
She moved to Stockholm in 2002 as a research post doc at the Karolinska Institute and started her long-standing collaboration with Dr Mikael Gennser and the Swedish Navy. Returning to the UK in 2003 to set up home in Cumbria, her consultancy was founded, and work continued with the Swedish, now focusing more on the needs of technical naval divers. Other collaborations were forged with Alf Brubakk’s diving group at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.
In 2012, she was voted the European Underwater and Baromedical Society's (EUBS) Member-at-Large, serving on the executive committee for three years. At the end of that term in late 2014, she was pleased to continue her association with EUBS, being appointed the new European (Deputy) Editor of the Journal of EUBS and the South Pacific Underwater Medical Society (SPUMS), 'Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine' (DHM).
In 2015, Lesley and Andreas Mollerlokken, along with backing from the Swedish Armed Forces Diving and Naval Medicine Centre and the Scott Haldane Foundation, organised and ran the inaugural International Meeting on Ultrasound for Hyperbaric Research - Ultrasound 2015. With a impressive array of speakers, it was a huge success and will hopefully take place again in the future - from it came a consensus document on using ultrasound in hyperbaric research, published by DHM.
From May 2019 to December 2020, Lesley worked as a full-time medical writer for Fishawack Health, an international medical communications agency. She gained experience in therapy areas including oncology and immuno-oncology, migraine, CNS disorders including depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease, cardio-respiratory conditions and therapies for auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease.
In 2021, Lesley started a new research collaboration with Prof. Peter Lindholm at the University of California at San Diego, where she continues her research into diving physiology, as well as working as a freelance medical writer.