O'Callaghan group

I completed my PhD at University of Adelaide, Australia, where I used a multimodal approach of meta-analysis and pre-clinical experimental models to characterise the arrhythmogenicity of epicardial fat. My PhD work led to multiple awards, including the Young Investigator Award (1^st Prize) at the European Heart Rhythm Association Congress, Spain. I then began a postdoctoral position at The University of Adelaide in 2019. In 2020, I was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at Amsterdam UMC (Netherlands) to study proteomic phenotyping of epicardial fat in atrial fibrillation, funded by the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand. In 2021, I was awarded University of Adelaide’s Emerging Leaders Grant for an in vitro study of cardiac fibrogenesis.

I started my Novo Nordisk Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with Professor Chris O’Callaghan (Nuffield Department of Medicine, NDM) and Dr Joanna Howson (NNRCO) in November 2021. The project builds on prior work on lipid-mediated genome-wide chromatin remodelling. I will use trans-omics approaches to develop a genome-wide map of the oxidized LDL-cholesterol-induced chromatin changes in coronary vascular cells. This will be integrated with GWAS information for cardiometabolic traits to identify new drug targets. These variants will be further tested and validated via focused in vitro experiments using cellular and molecular biology techniques.