Michelle Goonasekera

Michelle Goonasekera is a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Clinical Trials Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) at Oxford Population Health and an honorary consultant nephrologist at the Oxford Kidney Unit.

She works on large randomised trials in cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and diabetes, aiming to test interventions that prevent and treat common causes of death and disability with a particular interest in treatments aimed at reducing progression of chronic kidney disease.

She graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka (2002-2008) then completed her medical internship at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka. She moved to Oxford for postgraduate medical training and higher specialty training in Nephrology and General Internal Medicine. She was awarded an MD for work undertaken at CTSU (2020-2023) assessing the validity of health systems data for ascertainment of heart failure outcomes in clinical trials in the ASCEND trial of >15,000 participants with diabetes. She was also part of the team undertaking the ORION-4 study of inclisiran in cardiovascular disease during this time out of programme.

Michelle returned to CTSU in 2024 after completing specialist training and is currently working on the ASCEND PLUS trial of oral semaglutide in type 2 diabetes and the EASi-KIDNEY trial of vicadrostat in chronic kidney disease. She has a keen interest in developing novel methods of using health systems data to streamline large randomised trials and is currently the Oxford Lead for the Health Data Research UK Transforming Data for Trials Programme.

Michelle takes and active interest in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate trainees and is part of the faculty for the Short Course in Clinical Trials for Low- and Middle-income Countries  and supports the MSc in Clinical Trials.