My research interests focus on investigating the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and their diagnosis and therapies using advanced computational modelling.
At the moment, the main four themes of my research are:
Mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and defibrillation in acute myocardial ischaemia. Funded by an MRC Career Development Award.
Modelling drug action on cardiac electrophysiological behaviour.This research is funded through the EU grant called preDiCT, Computational prediction of drug cardiotoxicity, which involves collaborations with academic and industrial partners (including major pharmaceutical companies) and is coordinated by the University of Oxford.
CHASTE, Developing software for realistic heart simulations. Funded by an EPSRC grant with Prof. David Gavaghan, and Drs Joe Pitt-Francis and Jon Whiteley from the Oxford University Computing Laboratory.
Electromechanical modelling of the heart to study cardiac resynchronysation therapy. Funded by a EU grant called euHeart, personalised & integrated cardiac care, coordinated by Philips and University of Oxford.
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Team members working in these projects are:
- Postdoctoral Researchers: Alberto Corrias, Philip Prior, Esther Pueyo (joint appointment Universidad de Zaragoza), Christian Bollensdorff (Oxford MEF Group).
- Dphil Students: Miguel Bernabeu, Rafel Bordas, Thomas Brennan, Thushka Maharaj, Matt Gibbs.
Former Members:
- Postdoc: Lucia Romero (Lecturer at Universidad Politecnica de Valencia)
- Dphil: Martin Bishop (now holding a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellowship also at the Oxford Computational Biology Group).
- Short DTC projects (rotations): Michal Plotkowiak, Simon Li, Dan Stokeley.
In 1997, I graduated as an Electronics Engineer from the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain. Between 1998 and 2001, I studied my PhD at the Integrated Laboratory of Bioengineering supervised by Prof. Chema Ferrero and worked as an Assistant Professor in Electronics and Biomedical Instrumentation at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. My PhD studies aimed at investigating the causes of extracellular potassium accumulation during acute ischaemia using a single cell mathematical model. After graduating in 2001, I joined Prof. Natalia Trayanova's group at Tulane University in New Orleans (now at Johns Hopkins University), as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. There, we investigated the mechanisms of cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks in normal and globally ischemic hearts. After spending two years in New Orleans, I joined Oxford University in August 2004, as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. David Gavaghan, funded by the Integrative Biology Project. In August 2007, I was awarded an MRC Career Development Award to fund my research in Oxford. I am also the Associate Editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A for the cluster of Medical Engineering Biological Mathematics and Biophysics.
