Dr Sharon Owen

Dr Sharon Owen works as a Research Technician within the Oswestry Keele Orthopaedic Research group (OsKOR) reporting to Professor Karina Wright at the Robert Jones & Agnes Hunt (RJAH) Orthopaedic Hospital. She provides technical support for the acquisition and processing of human tissues for multiple projects.

Over the years, her work spanned from investigating the stress response of cells from the intervertebral disc (Grammer and European Spine Journal Award, 2010), investigations into the purity of commercially prepared proteoglycans and the potential of blood biomarkers to predict neurological outcome in spinal cord injury patients. In 2014, Sharon was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship to investigate the integration of intervertebral disc tissue at the vertebral interface of human lumbar spines. More recently, Sharon has been working on a GOSH and SPARKS funded project investigating the proteomic profile of cells from different clinical severities of Spinal Muscular Atrophy patients.

Sharon’s research interests include biology and pathology of musculoskeletal disorders, particularly in the intervertebral disc; biomarker research for spinal cord injury patients; and disease mechanisms in spinal muscular atrophy.

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