Professor Sejal Saglani leads the Paediatric Severe Asthma Group in the National Heart & Lung Institute (NHLI) at Imperial College London. She is Director of the Centre for Paediatrics & Child Health at Imperial College London. She is consultant in Paediatric Respiratory Medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital and part of the Paediatric Difficult Asthma Team.

Professor Saglani studied and qualified in medicine at the University of Leicester before completing clinical specialist training in respiratory paediatrics. Funded by Asthma UK, she studied her postgraduate degree at the NHLI, focusing on abnormalities of severe infant and pre-school wheeze/asthma. For this, she received the NHLI’s best thesis prize.

After completing clinical specialist training, Prof Saglani received a British Lung Foundation Research Fellowship to develop an experimental model of allergic asthma and, following this, a Wellcome Intermediate Clinical Fellowship to investigate the mechanisms mediating the onset of pre-school wheeze and asthma in early life. Professor Saglani has since been awarded a Medical Research Council (MRC) New Investigator Award, a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Career Development Fellowship and currently is running an NIHR funded clinical trial of new treatments for childhood severe asthma. She was awarded Fellowship of the European Respiratory Society (FERS) and Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2025.

Areas of expertise and research interests Professor Saglani’s clinical expertise and research interests include:

• management of pre-school children with recurrent wheezing
• management of school age children with difficult asthma
• factors predicting progression of pre-school wheeze to school-age asthma
• the identification of novel therapies for pre-school wheeze and childhood severe asthma

Professor Saglani has established a translational research programme. It involves an integrated approach using a neonatal pre-clinical model, airway samples from children and direct application and clinical translation of her findings in interventional clinical trials.