Professor Helmy is Professor of Translational Neurosurgery and a Consultant Neurosurgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals.

A large part of the group's work is on people with brain injuries, such as head injury and subarachnoid haemorrhage (bleeding around the brain). In these conditions, much of the damage to the brain does not happen at the moment of injury itself, but in the hours and days that follow, as the brain's own inflammatory response causes further harm. The team is investigating how this inflammation develops, and testing novel treatments that target it directly, work that feeds into large-scale clinical trials to establish which treatments genuinely improve outcomes for patients.

The group's second major area of research is meningioma, the most common type of primary brain tumour. Many patients who undergo surgery to remove a meningioma go on to experience seizures, and the team is investigating why this happens, in particular the role that inflammation plays in triggering seizures after surgery. This work is part of a national clinical trial looking at whether anti-seizure medications can help prevent this complication, with the aim of improving recovery and quality of life for meningioma patients.

Supporting this research will help the team turn a better understanding of inflammation in the injured or operated-on brain into treatments that reduce harm, prevent seizures, and improve outcomes for patients recovering from some of neurosurgery's most common and serious conditions.