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Blanca Rodriguez

Dr Blanca Rodriguez Career Development Fellow blanca@cs.ox.ac.uk +44 1865 610806 Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD

Interests

My research interest is in the investigation of the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and their diagnosis and therapies using synergistic combinations of advanced computational modelling and simulation, experimental and clinical methods.

Cardiac arrhythmias are disturbances in the rhythm of the heart. They are a major cause of concern because they affect a large part of the population, they can be lethal and they result in high socio-economic cost. Cardiac arrhythmias can be caused by disease, drugs, mechanical impacts and mutations but nobody knows exactly how they start or how to diagnose and treat them optimally. The mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias are complex, multiscale and non-linear, involving numerous multiscale feedback loops from the gene to the whole body level. An additional difficulty is that arrhythmias are apparently random and rare event, and therefore investigating their causes is an even more challenging task. Advanced modelling and simulation in combination with experimental and clinical investigations represents an ideal methodology to overcome some of the challenges involved in dissecting mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias.

The research builds on a collaborative effort involving both academic and industrial partners. I have active collaborations with:

• Andras Varro and Istvan Baczko at the University of Szeged (experimental human cardiac electrophysiology);
• Igor Efimov at the University of Washington in St Louis (experimental human and rabbit cardiac electrophysiology);
• Peter Taggart and Ben Hanson at University College London (clinical cardiac electrophysiology);
• Esther Pueyo and Pablo Laguna at the University of Zaragoza (computational modelling and signal processing of the electrocardiogram);
• David Abramson at Monash University (NIMROD, software for sensitivity analysis and optimisation);
• Pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. 

My main collaborators in Oxford are:

• Image processing of experimental and clinical datasets (Vicente Grau)
• Mathematical modeling and parameter fitting  (Kevin Burrage)
• Computational mathematics, numerical analysis and scientific computing (Kevin Burrage, Pras Pathmanathan, David Kay, David Gavaghan, Joe Pitt-Francis)
• Combined theoretical and experimental methods (Alex Quinn, Peter Kohl, Denis Noble)
• Conceptual aspects of modeling and simulation in physiology (Annamaria Carusi).

The tools used and developed in our research are freely-available and include:

• Chaste, our open-source softwage package for the simulation of cardiac electromechanical activity (www.cs.ox.ac.uk/chaste). The website also provides links to download anatomically-based models of the ventricles.
• COR, a great tool for single cell action potential simulations: http://cor.physiol.ox.ac.uk/
• the cellML repository, containing code for single cell action potential models: http://models.cellml.org/ 

My research has received funding by the Medical Reseach Council (Career Development Award), the European Comission (preDiCT- Computational prediction of drug cardiotoxicity, and euHeart - Personalised and integrated cardiac care), and the Royal Society (International Joint Project). Additional funding was also awarded by EPSRC, BHF, Wellcome Trust and Leverhume Trust for my research.

I am a lecturer and supervisor at the Doctoral Training Centres at University of Oxford (www.dtc.ox.ac.uk)

Current team members:

Postdoctoral Researchers:

Alex Quinn (2008- ; EPSRC postdoctoral fellow at MEF group, now Imperial College London), Alfonso Bueno-Orovio (2010- ), Ana Minchole (2011- ; Marie Curie IEF). 

Dphil Students:

• Matt Gibb (Expected 2012; jointly supervised with Vicente Grau and Martin Bishop);
• Ciara Dangerfield (Expected 2012; jointly supervised with Kevin Burrage and David Kay);
• John Walmsley (Expected 2012; jointly supervised with Kevin Burrage and Gary Mirams);
• Philip Gemmel (Expected 2012; jointly supervised with Kevin Burrage and Alex Quinn);
• Mikael Wallman (Expected 2012; jointly supervised with Nic Smith);
• Sara Dutta (Expected 2013; jointly supervised with Pras Pathmanathan, Alex Quinn and Martin Bishop).
• Oliver Britton (Expected 2014; jointly supervised with Alfonso Bueno-Orovio).

 Former Postdocs:

• Nejib Zemzemi (2010-2011 -> Tenure-track researcher at INRIA-Bordeaux, France)
• Xiao Jie (2009-2010-> postdoctoral researcher at University College London, UK);
• Alberto Corrias (2008-2010; -> Tenure-track lecturer at University of Singapore, Singapore);
• Esther Pueyo (-> 2007-2008; Assistant Professor at Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain);
• Lucia Romero (2008-09-> Tenure-track lecturer at Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain);
• Philip Prior (2008-09; -> Medical Physicist, Medical College of Wisconsing, USA);

 Former Students:

• Rafel Bordas (2007-2011; postdoctoral researcher at Oxford Computational Biology Group);
  
• Miguel Bernabeu (DPhil; 2007-2011 --> postdoctoral researcher at University College London);
• Martin Bishop (DPhil; 2004-2008 --> Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellowship; 2011- Lecturer at King College London);
• Thushka Maharaj (DPhil; 2004-2007 -> Credit Suisse);
• Thomas Brennan (DPhil; 2006-2009 -> postdoctoral researcher at Oxford Bioengineering). 
• Carlos Sanchez (Rotation, University of Zaragoza, 2010, 2011);
• Ivan Cenci (Rotation, University of Bologna, 2009);
• Chris Arthurs (short project, DTC, 2009 -> DPhil. Oxford Computational Biology Group);
• Michal Plotkowiak (short project, DTC, 2008 -> DPhil. Oxford Computational Biology Group);
• Simon Li (short project, DTC, 2006);
• Dan Stokeley (short project, DTC, 2004 -> DPhil. Oxford Computational Biology Group);

Biography

Blanca was born in Valencia, Spain, where she attended the Lycee Francais de Valencia, and graduated as an Electronics Engineer from the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, in 1997. She then started a PhD in the Integrated Laboratory of Bioengineering supervised by Prof. Chema Ferrero and at the same time became an Assistant Professor in Electronics and Biomedical Instrumentation at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. During her PhD studies, she investigated the causes of extracellular potassium accumulation during acute ischaemia using a mathematical model of single cell action potential. After graduating in 2001, she joined Prof. Natalia Trayanova's group at Tulane University in New Orleans (now at Johns Hopkins University), as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research focused on the mechanisms of cardiac vulnerability to electric shocks in normal and globally ischemic hearts. In 2004, she won the First Prize in the Young Investigator Award Competition in Basic Science of the Heart Rhythm Society. After spending two years in New Orleans, she joined Oxford University in August 2004, as a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. David Gavaghan, funded by the Integrative Biology Project. Since 2007, she holds a Medical Research Council Career Development fellowship and she has also been awarded funding by European Comission, Royal Society, EPSRC, Wellcome Trust, BHF and Leverhulme Trust.

Manage publications

Info

Themes	Computational Biology
Activities	Cardiac Physiology | Computational Biology group
Projects	Mechanisms of arrhythmogenesis and defibrillation in ischaemia |
Completed Projects	Chaste | preDiCT | euHeart
Students	Miguel Bernabeu Oliver Britton Ciara Dangerfield Sara Dutta Philip Gemmell Matt Gibb Mikael Wallman John Walmsley

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