This exciting research is working towards the prevention of cardiovascular disease and related disorders by translating clinical discoveries in human stem cell biology, developmental and clinical physiology, and population-based research into health promotion measures and interventions.
By choosing this area of research, you will be concentrating on the heart, blood vessels, pancreas, liver and musculoskeletal tissues to increase understanding of the early developmental processes that initiate cardiovascular disease. We are just starting to understand how a mother’s diet and body composition before and during pregnancy, combined with genetic predisposition and influences in infancy and childhood, can determine the way cardiovascular disease develops.
You will work in new, purpose-built laboratories, where your research can be linked with research in human developmental and stem cell biology and regeneration, integrative physiology, nutrition, together with clinical research on mothers and their offspring in the Southampton Women’s Survey. You can also benefit from important links with cancer sciences research on apoptosis in cardiac myocyte ischaemia/reperfusion injury.
We have strong links with clinical directorates the Wessex Institute for Health Research and Development, and the Wellcome Trust CRF. This gives our work a strong focus on questions of clinical relevance and helps us to translate our new discoveries into clinical care.
Research focus
- Understanding the biological mechanisms by which environmental, epigenetic and genetic processes interact to influence human pre-implantation embryo, stem cell growth and differentiation, organogenesis and early fetal growth
- How fetal, placental and postnatal adaptive responses determine the limits of later cardiovascular health
- The use of new knowledge of normal human embryonic and early fetal development to refine and direct human pluripotent and adult mesenchymal stem cell research
- Investigating the genetic basis of congenital heart disease and integrating this with knowledge of normal human cardiac development
- Exploiting expertise in embryonic and fetal development, clinical and epidemiological research to achieve translation of research discoveries into novel approaches to the prevention and early treatment of cardiovascular disease