Amanda Sathyapala (previously Natanek) is a consultant respiratory physician, and clinical lead of the home ventilation service, at Harefield Hospital and a senior lecturer in the airways disease section of the National Heart and Lung Institute of Imperial College London. 

Dr Sathyapala studied medicine at Cambridge University (1993–96) and Oxford University (1996–99), obtaining first class honours both in medicine and in experimental psychology during an intercalated BSc year. She completed her junior doctor training in Oxford and London, and her specialist respiratory and general internal medicine training in North-West Thames, in hospitals including the Hammersmith, Harefield and Royal Brompton Hospitals. She became a Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 2002.

Her PhD, which was funded by a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellowship, was awarded in 2011. Dr Sathyapala then went on to be awarded a HEFCE Clinical Senior Lectureship to continue her research. Since 2012, she has been a senior lecturer at the National Heart and Lung Institute of Imperial College London, and a Consultant Physician at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, starting a new home ventilation service at the Harefield site. In 2015, she was elected as a fellow to the Royal College of Physicians.

Clinical expertise

Dr Sathyapala’s clinical expertise includes:

• respiratory failure, particularly chronic ventilatory failure requiring non-invasive ventilation, as a result of conditions such as COPD, bronchiectasis, chest wall disease, lung fibrosis, or following surgery
• diagnosis and management of respiratory muscle weakness
• sleep-disordered breathing, such as obstructive sleep apnoea and obesity hypoventilation syndrome
• sleep disorders such as restless legs syndrome/periodic limb movement disorder.

She is one of only a few respiratory physicians trained to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia.

Research interests

Her interests and expertise are in chronic respiratory failure, sleep-disordered breathing, including obstructive sleep apnoea, and home nocturnal ventilation, as well as respiratory and skeletal muscle weakness.

Currently, Dr Sathyapala is working in sleep research, in relation to developing a complex intervention to improve treatment adherence and efficiency of service delivery, in addition to continuing her work on skeletal muscle dysfunction in COPD.