Personal profile
Clinical training
Mr Shapey underwent surgical training in the North-West of England which included several years of training at both the Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary unit and Pancreatic Transplant unit in Manchester, as well as a year of dedicated super-specialist training in pancreatic surgery in Liverpool. To complement his specialist experience, he also gained a broad training in general surgery from centres across the region with expertise in hernia and laparoscopic (keyhole) surgery. He concluded his formal training at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre with fellowship funding awarded jointly by the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland and Pancreatic Cancer UK. The focus of his time in Amsterdam was robotic pancreatic surgery, locally advanced pancreatic cancer surgery and pancreatic research.
Academic training
Mr Shapey graduated from the University of Birmingham with degrees in Healthcare Ethics and Law (2006) as well as Medicine and Surgery (2008). Here, he received the Sir Arthur Thompson scholarship to support his work leading to a thesis on the ethico-legal basis of user-fees for patients attending state funded and non-governmental organisation funded hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thereafter, Mr Shapey was awarded the Prieskel prize by the Royal College of Surgeons of England to support his further study of trauma surgery at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg (2007). As a post-graduate, Mr Shapey studied for a Masters degree in Surgical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh which was awarded with Distinction (2011). As the highest scoring student in his year, he was also awarded the Lister medal from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for his work on liver and kidney transplantation. In 2016, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh funded his pioneering work in pancreatic and islet transplantation, which led to further substantial funding from the Medical Research Council in the form of a Clinical Research Training Fellowship (2017-2020). Mr Shapey’s work on determining the optimal selection processes for pancreatic transplantation through the use of clinical data on metabolic and glycaemic control in combination with liquid biopsies was awarded the Norman Tanner medal by the Royal Society of Medicine (2017), a PhD from the University of Manchester (2019) and the Syme Medal from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (2021). His work has been widely published in peer reviewed academic journals. Now, as an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds, Mr Shapey is applying his knowledge of metabolism, glycaemic control and liquid biopsies to all aspects of pancreatic disease including cancer, pancreatitis and diabetes.
