Diseases of the Liver and Biliary System in Children

Dr Deirdre Kelly is a consultant pediatric hepatologist at theLiver Unit of Birmingham Children's Hospital and Reader inPaediatric Hepatology at the University of Birmingham.
She was born and brought up in Calcutta, India, in the post-Rajera while her father was working for Lipton's Tea. She spent herearly childhood in India and went to boarding school in Dublin whenshe was 12 years old. She first decided to become a doctor at theage of 8 and despite much opposition from family and nuns at herconvent school, persisted and went to Trinity College Dublin tostudy medicine in 1967.
She originally planned to be a General Practitioner but in herSenior House Officer days was encouraged to take an academic lineand apply for General Medicine rotations and take the membershipexams. She trained first in adult medicine, and then ingastroenterology and hepatology in Dublin with Professor DonaldWeir who encouraged her to do an MD thesis on folate catabolismwith Professor John Scott, a world authority on folatemetabolism.
While in Dublin she had her two delightful sons while jugglingresearch/academic medicine/clinical practice and discovered thejoys of being a mother.
In 1982, she moved to London to work with Dame Sheila Sherlockat the Royal Free Hospital, where she became interested inpediatric hepatology. Dr Kelly retrained in pediatrics withProfessor Otto Wolff at Great Ormond Street and Professor JohnWalker Smith at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hackney.
In 1987 she went to work as an Assistant Professor in PediatricGastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of Nebraska inOmaha US.
Dr Kelly used this time to learn about caring for childrenundergoing liver transplantation. Equipped with these new skillsshe returned to Birmingham in 1989 to set up a National Liver Unitto care for children with liver disease and undergoing livertransplantation.
The Unit has been very successful and is one of the busiestpediatric liver transplant programmes with survival rates of >90%. Dr Kelly now has three other consultant colleagues and a teamof junior doctors, research fellows, specialist nurses and othervaluable members of the multidisciplinary team.
They have achieved international standards for care of childrenwith liver disease and liver transplantation and currently are theonly unit in the UK to provide small bowel transplantation forchildren.
They have expanded their research programme to look atmechanisms which control the development of biliary epithelialcells, the underlying mechanisms for the pathophysiology ofmalnutrition in children with liver disease and the natural historyand management of chronic viral hepatitis in childhood. They have amajor interest in the outcome and quality of life followingtransplantation.