The BRC Cardiometabolic Programme has awarded its first career development fellowships to Dr Gabrielle Captur and Dr Stefano Masi.
Dr Captur and Dr Masi will take up their posts in April 2014 for one year of protected research training. This fellowship scheme is designed to give talented clinical academics an opportunity to accelerate their careers in biomedical research by providing the academics with protected time outside of current clinical and training commitments. The aim is to enable them to develop a research career within a leading clinical academic environment to secure external grants such as NIHR, MRC, Wellcome, BHF.
About the Fellows
Dr Gaby Captur is a PhD student at UCL’s Institute of Cardiovascular Science. She will be using the fellowship to continue research on her dissertation ‘Towards a better description of myocardial trabeculae – a fractal approach”.
Dr Captur will test the cardiac neotenization hypothesis in hypertrophic cardimyopathy using fractal analysis. By autumn 2014 Dr Captur aims to have characterised the trabecular complexity in dilated cardiomyopathy and will have contributed to the setting up of an operational biomedical research electronic data capture infrastructure, called REDCap, which she anticipates will support a large multi-heart imaging collaboration between six EU centres of excellence.
Dr Captur’s main interest is in the advancement of computational methods for cardiac imaging and she aspires towards further curriculum development in the field of translational bioinformatics, focusing on phenotype representation.
Dr Stefano Masi is a clinical research fellow at the National Centre for Cardiovascular Prevention & Outcomes (NCCPO) at UCL’s Institute of Cardiovascular Science. He will use the fellowship to explore the role of central haemodynamic parameters and novel cardiovascular risk factors’ exposure on the risk of cognitive impairment, as well as their relationship with subclinical measures of cardiovascular damage.
During this year, Dr Masi will collaborate with the Medical Research Council’s Lifelong Health & Aging Unit (LHA unit) and use data collected in the 1946 birth cohort. Dr Masi will test the hypothesis that central haemodynamics (such as aortic blood pressure and pulse wave velocity) represent better predictors of midlife cognitive performance than traditional cardiometabolic risk factors.
By the end of autumn 2014 Dr Masi aims to set up a new cardiometabolic-neurosciences research group within UCL, joining the forces of the NCCPO, Institute of Neurology, Institute of Cardiovascular Science and LHA Unit. This will provide the opportunity to study the relationships between central haemodynamics, brain blood flow (assessed by functional MRI), amyloid deposition (assessed by PET) and clinical measures of cognitive performance. Furthermore, Dr Masi will be able to study the reversibility of these patterns following effective treatment of common inflammatory and metabolic diseases.
Dr Masi’s interest is in the relationship between systemic haemodynamics, brain blood flow and evolution of cognitive impairment. Dr Masi intends to develop a long term career around the concept of preventing cardiovascular disease to prevent cognitive impairment.
