About his PhD project

My work will involve looking at heart development, with a particular emphasis on cardiac progenitor cells. The vertebrate heart tube extends as a consequence of the progressive addition of second heart field (SHF) progenitor cells within an epithelial sheet to the arterial and venous poles of the heart. Perturbation of this process results in congenital heart defects (CHD), affecting 1% of live births. T-­‐box transcription factor genes implicated in CHD regulate the emergence of a boundary segregating SHF cells to alternate cardiac poles. I will utilise deep learning techniques to integrate multi-omic and multi-modal data for my research projects along with experimental approaches decipher the role and understanding the segregation and boundary formation in the SHF cells.