Briefly, tell us about your background and career up to this point?
I grew up and went to medical school in Innsbruck, Austria. After graduating, I felt that a period of time abroad would be good for me – the first Foundation Year job in Leeds had me hooked on postgraduate training in the UK and almost 13 years later I’m still here! I did all my general Cardiology training in London; the London Chest and St Bartholomew’s Hospitals have been instrumental in laying a solid foundation during my training in Interventional Cardiology. Following a PhD in cardiovascular biomarkers at King’s College London, I am now an Academic Clinical Lecturer at St Thomas’ Hospital where I am able to refine my skillset in complex coronary intervention while also having dedicated time to focus on my research interests.
What is a typical day like for you? How has this changed due to COVID-19?
I don’t think we had any typical days since COVID-19 has swept the world! But my routine on clinical days includes getting up at 5am to start my day with a kiwi before riding on my Kawasaki Versys to St Thomas’. I’m either spending my days in the interventional catheter labs, on-call or looking after the inpatients. When I come home, family-life takes priority until my 4-month-old daughter is in bed. I like to cook, so preparing dinner is often my way of relaxing after the workday.
Looking back, what has the pandemic and resulting lockdowns taught you?
Less is more! London (or is it just modern life?) has this ability to always engage you in the rat-race – and amongst it all, one sometimes forgets about family and the people closest to you. The pandemic was and is stressful in a number of ways for everybody; but if I had to look for positive aspects, then an increased focus on what’s really important in your personal and professional life would certainly be one of them. As an immigrant and now dual-national, most of my family remains abroad – what previously felt so close, felt suddenly terribly far away when the lockdowns started and prevented us from travelling to see our loved ones. These scarce moments with family have become ever more precious. But an increased focus and reduced ‘noise’ equally help with work – identifying the key-projects that really move the needle and working on them has become my overarching goal.
What do you think people in the School would find most surprising about you?
That I’m both an IT geek and have spent some years in my youth as a competitive ballroom dancer.
What advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?
None, for fear of disrupting the space-time-continuum.
Do you have any current projects that you’d like to tell us about?
My PhD focussed on a novel biomarker called cardiac myosin-binding protein C (cMyC) which we have mostly used in the assessment of patients with suspected myocardial infarction. Together with my supervisor Prof Mike Marber, I’ve spent the past two years collaborating with industry-partners to bring the biomarker to the clinical laboratory. We believe it could help ruling-out heart attacks in more patients with a single blood test (or on point-of-care, at the patient’s bedside).
The future, probably, lies in better rule-in: at the moment, we have super-sensitive blood tests that can detect myocardial injury equivalent to the cardiac version of man-flu, but we fail to use them in an efficient way to figure out what type of myocardial injury patients sustained – whether it’s due to the classic version of infarction from plaque rupture, or simply greater demand on cardiac output, or even just a bystander of a severe, whole-body illness. We think there might be a way to tell the difference using cMyC, but only time and more work on this will tell!
Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?
I recently read a beautiful quote that we all are ‘the ancestors of our future happy selves’. In spite of all the challenges (e.g., splitting your time between two demanding fields), I want to make a career as a clinical academic ‘work’ as I feel it provides you with the opportunity to focus on delivering excellent care, whilst also keeping an eye on the ‘big picture’ questions. And whilst every rejected grant application or publication is cause for some disappointment, these experiences usually make the final product better – which in turn makes you a better researcher and makes for a more fulfilling life in the long run.
What are you most looking forward to this year?
A COVID-vaccinated world that allows us to 1) meet friends and family without restrictions, and 2) restart cardiovascular research that had to be suspended due to the pandemic.