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Staff Profile

Dr Rhys Thomas

Clinical Senior Lecturer/Hon Consultant

Background

Rhys joined Newcastle University from Cardiff University in August 2017. He is an Honorary Consultant in Epilepsy at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, where he leads on epilepsy and learning disability, genetic testing in the epilepsies. He is a Consultant in the NHS Highly Specialised Service for rare mitochondrial disorders, taking an interest in epilepsy and stroke-like episodes.


Rhys is currently helping to lead a COVID19 study reporting the pattern of neurological and neuropsychiatric features, together with colleagues from the Universities of Southampton, Liverpool and UCL. CoroNerve is a consortium bringing together the ABN, BPNA, BNPA, BASP, NACCS and RCPsych to harmonise case reporting in the UK.  Our first 153 notifications are available published in Lancet Psychiatry, and the main data in Brain Communications.  The paediatric series is in Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. He is leading locally on COVID-CNS a £2.3m UKRI study of the biomarkers of neuropsychiatric features of COVID. 


Rhys is Co-Director of the Newcastle ERUK Doctoral Hub with Prof Andy Trevelyan am ambitious project that will bring through the brightest young talent locally in a Masters and PhD programme. Please feel free to contact me about this.


His research interests include the causes and consequences of epilepsy - primarily the genetic causes of the epilepsies.  With Dr David Lewis-Smith (Wellcome 4Ward North Clinical PhD Fellow) he studies genotypic and phenotypic patterns in common and rare epilepsies including using the Epi25 and UKBiobank. Rhys works closely with SUDEP Action in studying the Epilepsy Death Register, the paediatric paper was published in 2021. Rhys was the 2017 Royal College of Physicians Linacre lecturer. He spoke about the risks and benefits of sodium valproate for women of child-bearing age.


Rhys is the Clinical lead for the Mitochondrial disorders PSP (Priority Setting Partnership) which is a collaboration of patients, carers and clinicians to identify the research questions most important to children and adults with mitochondrial disorders, This was launched in February 2020 Mito top 10 and is funded by the Wellcome Trust via the Genetic Alliance UK. 

He is now Clinical lead for a PSP led by Epilepsy Research UK, launched in 2021. 


He is an Associate Editor of Practical Neurology, Web Editor of Seizure and is on the editorial board of Clinical Medicine. He is a Trustee for Epilepsy Research UK, Disability North, Treasurer for the British Branch of the International League Against Epilepsy and a medical advisor for Epilepsy Action. 

Google Scholar: Click here.

Research

Rhys is interested in the interplay between common and rare genetic variants and how these contribute to produce common and rare epilepsies.

Alongside colleagues at Cardiff University he is looking at the effects of copy number variation in the general population (Kendall et al. Biol Psychiatry 2017), in families with genetic generalised epilepsy, and in people with drug-resistant juvenile myoclonic epilepsy. In 2013-2014 he had a year on an epilepsy fellowship under Professors Sam Berkovic and Ingrid Scheffer at the University of Melbourne. Here he worked on the Epi4K families project (Brain 2017). He retains close links with Professor Mark Rees and Dr Owen Pickrell at Swansea University using data-linking to look at epilepsy comorbidities.


He is a member of -

EuroEpinomics

A collaboration of European Epilepsy researchers. Rhys is the lead for epilepsy associated with CHD2 variants (Thomas et al. Neurology 2015)

Epi25

An international consortium utilising deep sequencing techniques at scale to identify rare variants in common epilepsies

The Epi4K Consortium for Familial Epilepsies

Harnessing the power of large families to understand heritability, phenotypic expression and to drive gene discovery (Epi4K, Brain 2017; Epi4k/EPGP Lancet Neurology 2017)

The International League Against Epilepsy Consortium on Complex Epilepsies

Genome wide association studies to understand common epilepsies

BIOJUME

Using indices of ictogenicty to stratify a genome wide association study of people with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy

ENIGMA-Epilepsy

A mega-analysis of imaging from people with epilepsy (Whelan et al. Brain 2018)


Publications