Chancellors Fellow
School of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences

My current research interests concern the study of vascular remodelling during angiogenesis in order to identify molecular targets for its regulation (in close collaboration with research groups at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, and the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Lisbon). In addition, I’m exploring the translational potential of these findings for the treatment diabetic retinopathy with collaborators at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School. We are currently running a pilot study for the identification of diabetic retinopathy biomarkers based on image processing and computational blood flow models. My research is interdisciplinary in nature and involves several complementary lines of work: image processing for the analysis and reconstruction of vascular networks, development of multiscale mathematical models of vascular biomechanics and mechanobiology, parametrisation of these models based on experimental data at the cellular and subcellular levels (e.g. protein expression and signalling pathways), parallel implementation of these models and execution in large scale High Performance Computing resources, and data analytics for the integration of simulation and experimental results.