Dr Ilknur Aktan

Following graduation from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Istanbul University in 1999, Ilknur worked for a short time as a vet in small animal practice and on a poultry farm. She then travelled to England to pursue a postgraduate career. She joined the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) in 2002 to carry out voluntary work where she was subsequently offered a PhD studentship, funded by Defra, to study the interactions of E. coli O157:H7 with other attaching and effacing E. coli in ruminants. Her thesis was focused on host-pathogen interactions with a view to developing interventions to reduce or eliminate shedding of O157:H7 by ruminants, thus preventing entry into the food chain. She was registered at the University of Liverpool and carried out her research at the VLA in Surrey in Professor Martin Woodward's work group in the Department of Food and Environmental Safety.

Ilknur then joined the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in 2008 as a post-doctoral research associate in Prof Fiona Cunningham's work group, researching the antimicrobial properties of equine platelets and their interaction with neutrophils. During her post-doctoral research, she volunteered to undertake teaching in the Comparative Biomedical Sciences department at the RVC. In 2012, she took the opportunity to become a full time Veterinary Anatomy demonstrator. Here she contributed to the curriculum of the first and second year BVetMed programme and the accelerated year programme for graduates and BSc course.

She joined the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Surrey in April 2014 as a Teaching Fellow in Veterinary Anatomy. Ilknur is currently Senior Lecturer in Veterinary Anatomy, teaching all aspects of Anatomy. Ilknur is also involved in clinical skills teaching linking preclinical Anatomy to Clinical Anatomy.