Svetlana Reilly

I am a scientist with ~8 years of experience as a general physician. I have been long-interested in the mechanisms of atrial fibrillation and cardiac fibrosis. 

I graduated in medicine in 1998 in Russia and worked as a general physician until moving to the UK in 2005. After completing my DPhil in 2010 at the University of Oxford (the Queens’ College), I was awarded the Transitional Fellowship by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Oxford Centre of Excellence (2013) and the BHF Intermediate Fellowship in 2016. I am currently an Associate Professor in Cardiovascular Science and a group leader/PI, driven by the prospect that one day my work will make a real difference to patients’ management and care.  

My programme of research on atrial fibrillation and cardiac fibrosis attracted a number of fruitful internal, national and international collaborations with the top labs in Medical Sciences. Our joint efforts facilitated the discovery of a new calcitonin-signalling cascade in atrial myocardium that can potentially shift our understanding of myocardial biology and pave the way for new therapeutics in atrial fibrillation. Furthermore, our research is highly interdisciplinary, as it involves industrial collaborations, drug-discovery studies, structural biology, high-throughput and, functional and mechanistic studies. This inclusive and overarching approach to science is likely to provide new knowledge and influence multiple areas of Medical Sciences. Finally, leading and efficiently managing scientific networks offers a great opportunity for developing new studies, skills and opportunities for collaboration across all Medical Sciences.