Profile

I live in London with my husband and two amazing little people: Sofia and Daniel. We have lots of fun together! We get to spend lots of time playing (Lego is my favourite!), drawing, singing and visiting cool places like zoos and museums. I love listening to music from around the world, eating unusual food and exploring London on foot and public transport.

The heart does not go “toc toc toc” regularly for some people with heart diseases. Instead, it beats in a very uncoordinated way and therefore cannot pump blood to the rest of the body as well as it should.

Using Physics and Maths, I have created a virtual model of the heart in my computer to study these diseases. I first do bad things to it (like giving it electrical shocks or scarring it) to try to make it ill. I then try to treat this heart in my computer: I give it virtual drugs or more electrical shocks to try to make it better.

This way we don’t have to use treatments that don’t work in real people and potentially make them feel worse.

I always start my day with a big coffee. I then sit down to look at the computer programs that I left running at a super-computer overnight. I watch the videos of what happened to my virtual heart (did it get better with the new  thing I tried to do it?). If it doesn’t do what I was expecting, I need to think hard about what is going on and try to find a better way to treat the heart. This involves drinking more coffee, creating more computer programs and playing them again.

I also read a lot of small books and texts in scientific magazines about what other people that also try to treat heart diseases with computers have discovered. That gives me ideas for other ways to try to treat the virtual heart! Sometimes I discover something very cool. I check everything very carefully to make sure I did not make any mistakes and sometimes write a little text of my own for a scientific magazine so that everybody who is interested can find out what I discovered!