Dr Christopher O’Shea, Research Associate within the Heart Failure and Arrhythmia Research cluster at the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences, has been awarded a prestigious Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.
The award will allow Dr O’Shea’s research, which focuses on the use of data and artificial intelligence, to help advance our understanding and treatment of atrial fibrillation, the most common cardiac arrhythmia that affects over 30 million people.
In this four-year fellowship, Dr O’Shea will collaborate with world leading experts Professor Igor Efimov at George Washington University, USA and Dr Martin Bishop at King’s College London to develop and apply new computational approaches for human cardiac mapping.
Access to clinical datasets is enabled through collaborative links with Dr Manish Kalla (Birmingham, Oxford), Professor Timothy Betts (Oxford), Professor Elijah Behr (St George’s London), Professor Steven Niederer (King’s College London) and Professor Paulus Kirchhof (Hamburg).
Dr O’Shea completed his PhD in 2020 at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Dr Davor Pavlovic, Dr Kashif Rajpoot, Professor Larissa Fabritz, Dr Robert Neely and Dr Joao Correia. He worked to develop and apply novel analysis approaches to pre-clinical cardiac mapping datasets. This work produced eight first-author papers and three further co-authored publications, and Dr O’Shea was the recipient of the 2020 Michael K. O'Rourke Best Publication Award.
In his PhD, Chris demonstrated his aptitude for developing novel mapping analysis and cross-disciplinary work and I am excited to be part of his further progress. This is an exciting time in cardiac research with data and AI expected to play a significant role in advancing the field, and Chris is ideally positioned to become one of the leaders of this zeitgeist.
Dr Pavlovic, a University of Birmingham sponsor on Dr O’Shea’s Fellowship
