Profile

I live with two flatmates in central London, only a 10 minute walk away from work. As I have moved serveral times in my life I have family in different countries. My daughter lives in Oslo, Norway, my sister in Prague, Czech Republic, and my mom in Toronto Canada. In my holidays and on weekends I often travel to see my family, but I also like to travel to see new things. This year I have been exploring the UK. My favourite places so far were Bath and Seven sisters. In a few months I will go to Edinborough. I spend a lot of time reading about science and thinking about how to make medicine better with computers. When I am not doing this I like to go to the gym and train with weights, and practice stretching to do the splits.

What problem am I trying to solve?

Your heart is a pump that squeezes in response to electricity. For healthy people this electricity comes in a steady rhythm, which allows the heart to pump well and keeps the body alive. Some people have scars in the heart which make the electricity flow in bad ways. One bad way for electricity to flow is in a loop. A loop makes signals that beat the heart too fast so that it cannot pump properly.

My job is to guess which patients might get an electrical loop, so that doctors can help them by putting a pacemaker into their body. I also try to find out which patients do not need help, so that they don’t get pacemakers if they do not need them.

How can I guess who needs help?

I use a special kind of medical image in which scars appear as bright white areas in the heart. I then use a computer to calculate how electricity moves around the scars, to see if a loop forms.

A medical image of a slice of the heart with a scar shown in the blue circle.

Here is a video of an electric loop that I found in a patient. The black line are little scars that cause problems for the electrical waves. These waves go through the scars at first, but later make a loop.

When I am at work I spend a lot of time setting up experiments on my computer. For this I need to program the computer to read and analyse medical images, and calculate the way electricity moves. Sometimes the calculations are very big and I have to use a supercomputer, which is really just many computers working together. I also read articles that doctors and other scientists have written about the technologies I use and the diseases that I work with. When I find something exciting I write it down and make an article out of it to share with the world.

For much of the day I am by myself reading, writing and experimenting. However it is also important for me to talk to other people about what I am doing, so that I can learn from them if they know something better than I do. That is why I also spend a bit of time every day talking to my fellow scientists about my work.