Cambridge Metabolism

I am an associate lecturer in Cardiovascular Division at King’s BHF Centre of Research Excellence with 8 years of cardiac metabolism scientific research experience (at the University of Oxford BHF Centre of Research Excellence, Prof Stefan Neubauer’s group and Prof Michael Shattock’s research group at the Rayne Institute, King’s College London) with the expertise in cellular biochemistry (cardiovascular metabolism, physiology, insulin resistance, chronic renal failure, NMR spectroscopy, metabolomics, mitochondrial biology).I am currently endeavouring to combine my interdisciplinary skills in cardiac physiology, metabolism and NMR to establish my own research niche to investigate the metabolic drivers and consequences of hypoxic fetal programming, role of Nai in diabetic cardiomyopathy and developing NMR techniques to non-invasively, in real time measure free radical production and oxidant stress. I am also an academic tutor (University of Oxford and King’s College London), lecturer, admissions tutor and graduate student supervisor. Furthermore I am actively involved in science outreach projects as a volunteer expert mentor in iSerbia scientific knowledge transfer programme as well as for British Heart Foundation campaigns.
To date I researched, wrote, edited, contributed and published 17 manuscripts (2 featured on Nature and Cell Metabolism covers), conference abstracts and international presentations in addition to reviewing studies for the Journal of Molecular and Cell Cardiology, Diabetes, PLOS One, JOVE and Experimental Physiology.

EXPERIMENTAL COMPETENCE & SKILLS
1) Langendorff heart perfusions and ex-vivo cardiac function analysis (murine and rodent hearts)
2) Cardiac 13C, 31P, 23Na NMR spectroscopy, 1H MRS metabolomics: metabolic data acquisition and
analysis (in situ NMR heart perfusions)
3) Mitochondrial isolation and respiration measurements (murine and rodent experimental models)
4) Murine cardiac fibre isolation and mitochondrial respiration measurements
5) Myocardial oxygen consumption measurements (using NeoFox optical probes)
6) In vitro spectrophotometric enzyme assays (adenylate kinase, creatine kinase, GAPDH, 3-
phosphoglycerate kinase, pyruvate kinase, pyruvate dehydrogenase, lactate dehydrogenase, citrate synthase, mitochondrial respiratory complex I-IV, F1F0ATP synthase, free fatty acid and glucose concentration determination, pentose phosphate pathway constituent enzyme activities, endogenous glycogen and triglyceride content assessment, creatine kinase isoenzyme analysis)
7) 5/6 nephrectomy surgical procedure (chronic kidney disease experimental model)
8) In-vivo non-invasive physiological and biochemical measurements (HOMA insulin resistance
index, glucose tolerance test, insulin tolerance test, blood pressure monitoring, blood sampling)
9) Cardiomyocyte isolation (murine and rodent) and biochemical measurements in isolated cells
using light and confocal microscopy
10) SDS PAGE and Western Blotting protein analysis
11) Coronary vascular casting /microvascular corrosion casting (murine and rodent experimental models)
12) High performance liquid chromatography