Founded in 1900, the University is one of the leading research-based universities in the United Kingdom; the breadth of research expertise is a distinctive characteristic of the University.
Over 150 staff, post-doctoral fellows and students work together to improve outcomes for patients with cardiovascular diseases in the Institute of CardioVascular Sciences (ICVS). The institute has a continuous footprint on the Institute of Biomedical Research comprising a state-of-the-art electrophysiology suite with patch clamp, cellular and organ electrophysiology and small animal cardiac imaging facilities. We lead the Birmingham COMPARE site with access to ca 15 super-resolution microscopes optimised for imaging of single molecules and structures in platelets, fibroblasts, and cardiomyocytes. These specialist facilities complement state-of-the art technology to quantify RNA, proteins, and genes in cells, organs, and blood. The Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences is also the academic base for two University Spinout Companies (Chimeric Therapeutics Ltd and Viatem Ltd)
The team:
Professor Larissa Fabritz
Professor of Cardiovascular Sciences
Professor Larissa Fabritz studies novel mechanisms of heart disease and performs translational research towards mechanism-based therapies of cardiovascular diseases. As a clinical consultant, she sees patients in the Department of Cardiology at UHB. Larissa engages in research on molecular mechanisms of cardiomyopathies and arrhythmias as well as molecular cardiovascular imaging with her working group at the University of Birmingham and collaborations throughout Europe and North America.
Link to staff profile: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/cardiovascular-sciences/fabritz-larissa.aspx
Professor Georgios V. Gkoutos
Professor of Clinical Bioinformatics
Professor Gkoutos holds the chair of Clinical Bioinformatics a joint appointment between the University of Birmingham Medical School and the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. He is a Faculty Affiliate Professor of Clinical Bioinformatics, Berkeley Lab, Associate Director of MRC Health Data Research UK, co-Director of the WCH-Birmingham Research Institute and an Alan Turing Fellow.
Prof Gkoutos’s research background lies within the areas of clinical and biomedical informatics, health data science, computational biology, and translational research aiming at the discovery of molecular origins of human disease and the precision medicine developments of novel disease diagnostic and intervention strategies. His expertise lies in the fields of integrative systems biology, biomedical knowledge formalization, standardisation and representation, multimodal large data harmonization, interoperability and integration, comparative phenomics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and multiomics integration and analytics. His research lab has over 30 academic members, supported by a >50M active competitive research income (>5.6M lab funding), with diverse interdisciplinary expertise from medicine, biology and genetics to bioinformatics, data science, engineering, mathematics, statistics and Artificial Intelligence. He has over 200 peer reviewed publications, an h-index 57, i10 index 143, and he is closely involved with international efforts and policy development initiatives, standards, resources, and sharing strategies across Europe, Australasia, China and North America.
Link to staff profile: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/cancer-genomic/gkoutos-georgios.aspx
Dr Winnie Chua
Senior post-doctoral researcher
Dr Winnie Chua is a senior post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Birmingham. Her interests lie in translational research aiming to discover markers of cardiovascular diseases and the interaction between cardiovascular diseases with cognitive function. Since completing her PhD in 2015, she has gathered extensive experience and expertise in statistical modelling techniques, data harmonisation, interrogation of multimodal data, and working with large deeply phenotyped patient datasets. Dr Chua has been leading and managing workpackage tasks in EU FP7 and H2020 projects for the past 10 years and is very experienced with multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborations. Her recent publications focus on prognostic modelling for atrial fibrillation using multimodal data (clinical markers, biomarkers, imaging, etc).
Link to staff profile: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/cardiovascular-sciences/chua-winnie.aspx