Award British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) Centre of Research Excellence at Imperial College was recently successfully renewed until 2024.

The new funding award builds on the success of previous BHF funding and will use convergent science within the College to drive innovation and improvement in cardiovascular health. The Centre has identified cardiovascular engineering, imaging, genetics and genomics, and population sciences as key themes, and will draw on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to develop tailored treatments and management strategies for patients.

Professor Martin Wilkins, Vice Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Medicine, will lead the Centre from 1 April. Imperial will receive £4m from the Research Excellence Award between April 2019 and 2024. Professor Wilkins said, “This is an exciting opportunity to show what Imperial can do by bringing smart people from different disciplines together to focus on an important health problem. It comes at a time when we are co-localising bioengineers, chemists and public health experts at White City next to physician-scientists and our NIHR Clinical Research Facility on our Hammersmith Campus. We expect this to hasten translation and impact in clinical practice, bringing benefits to patients sooner.”

A core use of the funding is to support early-career researchers working collaboratively across traditional disciplines; bringing biomedical specialists together with those with engineering and mathematical expertise.

This news follows the successful renewal of the BHF Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine Centre in October 2017.

Click here to read the full story by Al McCartney, Imperial College London.