Asha Senapati
Chair
Asha is a Consultant Colorectal Surgeon and has treated patients with bowel cancer and all other bowel diseases for many years. She was Chair of one of the founding charities and is now Co-Chair of BRUK.
She is a past President of the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain & Ireland. She has an active role in the academic and charity sectors concerned with bowel diseases and has spoken and published widely in these areas.
She works at St Mark’s Hospital in Harrow and at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth.
She believed that the two founding charities would be better together and worked with Paul Reynolds to achieve the merger and create Bowel Research UK.
Matthew Black
Trustee
Matthew is a founding partner of Selby Projects, a real estate development management specialist. Prior to this he spent over 20 years at CBRE advising on large scale regeneration projects including the site assembly and legacy for the 2012 Olympic Games.
He is chairman of Polacks Educational Trust, a charity supporting pupils and providing scholarships to a Bristol School.
He is an active media spokesman in relation to the awareness of bowel cancer symptoms following his own diagnosis and successful treatment having undergone major surgery at The Royal Free Hospital in 2020.
Ms Elaine Burns
Trustee
Ms Elaine Burns is a Consultant Colorectal Surgeon at St Marks Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. Her area of clinical interest is in the surgical management of primary and recurrent colorectal cancer including robotic advanced cancer resections and pelvic sarcoma.
Elaine Burns trained in Coloproctology/Surgical Oncology in the North West London region, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and St Mark’s Hospital. She studied at the University of Edinburgh and spent three years in post-graduate research at the Imperial College London where she was awarded a PhD examining surgical quality and outcome research, including new technologies and volume outcome relationships.
She is Chair of the Research and Audit Committee of ACPGBI and an Associate Editor of Colorectal Disease.
Elaine’s principal research interests include colorectal surgical outcome research, colorectal quality measurement, perioperative optimisation, harm reduction and robotic surgery.
Nicola Fearnhead
Trustee
Consultant Colorectal Surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge
Nicola was President of the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain & Ireland in 2019/20.
She has been a Consultant Colorectal Surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge since 2006. She studied medicine at Pembroke College, Cambridge and Merton College, Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Surgical training was undertaken in Bristol and Oxford followed by an International Fellowship in Advanced Colorectal Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio during 2005.
Taryn McHarg
Trustee
Taryn is an experienced international business and finance leader renowned for operating in local and international health markets to provide financial oversight, regulatory compliance and innovative change in delivering corporate strategy and business value for key stakeholders.
Taryn is an Australian Chartered Accountant having trained at EY before moving into the health sector where she is currently working for a leading health insurance business. Taryn has experience working across the sector in international markets including China, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico, the US, the UK, the Middle East and Europe.
Charles Mesquita
Trustee
Charles is part of the Charities Team at Quilter Cheviot with responsibility for developing the firm’s specialist charity capability.
Charles has 30 years’ investment experience working for leading financial institutions including Newton, Rensburg Sheppards (now Investec Wealth & Investment) and latterly, Stanhope Consulting.
Charles founded the first Common Investment Fund investing in UK commercial property and established one of the first programme focused on ongoing education for charity trustees.
Charles is also a Trustee of R L Glasspool, a national charity which helps people in hardship, and PRISM, which helps to promote and to facilitate charitable giving in a flexible and efficient manner.
Professor Dion Morton FRCS
Trustee
Professor Morton is the Barling Chair of Surgery at the University of Birmingham and the CMO for the Midlands and South Genomic Medicine Service Alliance.
He was Chair of the Research Committee of the European Society of Coloproctology (ESCP) 2011 to 2019 and initiated the expansion of the clinical research portfolio and growth in international collaboration within the European colorectal community.
Currently, he is Chair of the Global Reach Committee. Nationally he was Director of Clinical Research at the Royal College of Surgeons of England 2012-2019.