Profile

I was born in Valencia (Spain) and for my PhD (more than 3 years ago) I came to the UK. I’ve lived in three different flats in London and now I’m in a new one in Cambridge with my partner. I’ve gone vegan during these years, which means that I don’t eat any meat, fish or animal-related products like eggs, milk or honey.

I know how to speak Spanish (duh), Catalan and I learnt a bit of French in UK. I’ve also gone to Kung Fu classes, so no messing with me (jk).

I love to watch movies and tv shows and if I had to choose (I don’t like to choose 🙁 ) I’d say that one of my favourite movies is Avengers Infinity War and The haunting of Hill House would be one my fav tv shows.

Pre covid I also loved to go to science fairs and workshops, this photo is from the Imperial Festival some years ago:

I work as a researcher, investigating the shape and function of hearts using computers.

Have you ever felt your heart pumping? (Just put your hand on the upper left side of your chest). But… have you ever seen it?

When people get sick or something doesn’t add up, the GP can ask for an MRI or a CT scan, like an X-ray to look inside your body without the need of opening your chest. It looks like this:

But these grey images are hard to understand and see something in detail, so my work consists of studying 3D versions of it, which looks more like this:

Now, this is very similar to a videogame. I can make it move, I can chop it up and re-build it, I can see through it… pretty much anything I want. Using a lot of maths, physics and computers I can see how changes in the shape of the heart affect how it pumps blood to the body or how some devices (pacemakers) work when it gets sick.

As a researcher, I don’t have a time schedule so I can wake up pretty much whenever I want. I usually do it around 7 am so then I can finish earlier in the afternoon. After breakfast (porridge) and reading a bit, I switch on the computer and start my working day.

I usually start checking e-mail, just in case someone needs my help, or my supervisors need me to do anything new or just to see if there are any news. And then I start coding. Coding is basically writing instructions in a very specific way so the computer understands what do you want it to do. In my case, I want it to take the heart and run a simulation of a heartbeat (it’s called simulation because it’s not an actual heartbeat, but an approximation). In the same way as you can use physics to know when a ball is going to fall if you drop it from your window, we can use physics to know how a heart is going to move depending on the size or how strong it is.

Computer code for this looks like this:

And the bad news is that not always works. When it doesn’t, it’s my task to figure out why. The most common reason is because I didn’t write the instructions properly. It’s like a baking recipe: you need to have all the steps very well written and clear or the results might not be what you expect!