Research Fellow

at  University College London

ABOUT US

We are seeking a highly motivated and enthusiastic postdoctoral research assistant to work on our British Heart Foundation sponsored project to investigate stem cell and biomaterial therapies for heart disease. The successful candidate will join Dr Daniel Stuckey’s team and will be based at the UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging (CABI) in central London www.ucl.ac.uk/centre-for-advanced-biomedical-imaging/. This role is to cover maternity leave and is for a duration of at least 6 months, with a possibility of further extension.

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Research from our lab and by others has indicated that stem cell therapies can regenerate damaged tissue and prevent heart failure. Our team at UCL, in collaboration with Prof. Molly Stevens Group at Imperial www.stevensgroup.org and the BHF’s Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine Centre www.imperial.ac.uk/bhf-regenerative-medicine/ are now testing new methods to repair the hearts of rodents, with the aim of translating our findings into clinical trials within 5 years. The postdoctoral research assistant will play a key role in this collaborative project by developing biomaterial and stem cell therapies and generating surgical models of heart disease which can be treated using these novel therapeutics. Experience of synthesising and characterising biomaterials and testing them in small animal models of regenerative medicine would be advantageous. An exciting element of this project is the use of advanced and clinically relevant imaging methods to evaluate how effective the cell therapies have been. These studies will be performed in the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging - a vibrant, multidisciplinary research centre and one of the premier biomedical imaging units in Europe. The Centre has a vast array of small animal imaging modalities, including MRI, PET and ultrasound. You will learn how to use these methods to image heart function and track the location of the grafted stem cells in vivo, allowing novel regenerative medicine approaches to be assessed.