Faculty Members
James Ware
James is Professor of Cardiovascular and Genomic Medicine at Imperial College London, MRC Investigator at the London Institute of Medical Sciences, and practices clinically as a Consultant Cardiologist at Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals. He also holds a visiting scientist position at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in Boston, MA. He is co-lead of the Cardiovascular Research Programme for Genomics England (GECIP Cardiovascular Domain), and Cardiovascular Theme lead for the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre.
j.ware@imperial.ac.uk
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/j.ware
@drjamesware
Paul Barton
Paul is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College and Genetics Research Manager at the Royal Brompton Hospital. His research interests include gene-environment interaction, and enhancing international collaboration.
p.barton@imperial.ac.uk
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/p.barton
@pjrbarton
Paz Tayal
Dr. Paz Tayal is a Post doctoral Clinical Lecturer studying the imaging and genetics of cardiomyopathies. Upasana is working on integrating genetic, imaging, and multiparametric phenotyping data to explore gene-environmental interactions, improve risk stratification and identify predictors of remodelling in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy.
u.tayal14@imperial.ac.uk
@doctor_paz
Angharad Roberts
Angharad is a Clinical Geneticist with a subspecialist interest in cardiac conditions; and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics Group. She is interested in the diagnosis of complex cases, delineating and understanding the variability in clinical expression of recognised syndromes (expanding the phenotype) and identifying new syndromes and diagnoses to inform both clinical practice and research.
angharad.roberts@imperial.ac.uk
Kathryn McGurk
Kathryn is a British Heart Foundation Immediate Fellow analysing the genetics of cardiovascular traits in the UK Biobank cohort and patient cohorts.
Senior Management
Rachel Buchan
Rachel is Project Coordinator for the CV genetics group. She leads the research delivery team and is based at the Royal Brompton and has a background in molecular biology.
Rachel oversees wet-lab projects, clinical observational studies and manages the Heart Hive a web portal to connect people with cardiomyopathy with research opportunities.
Catherine Enright
Catherine is the Cardiovascular Genetics & Genomics Research Group Manager, responsible for the day to day operation and administration of the Group including finance, grants and HR and contributes to strategic planning. Catherine previously worked for the British Heart Foundation then joined Imperial College to manage the Cardiac Medicine BHF Chair Department. She moved to central NHLI Section Administration, supporting cardiovascular groups at St Mary’s and South Kensington campuses before returning to Royal Brompton. She joined the Group in 2019. c.enright@imperial.ac.uk
Pantazis Theotokis
Pantazis Theotokis is a bioinformatician and data manager interested in developing and implementing new pipelines for the analysis of WGS data in cardiomyopathies. He is currently working on ways to improve integration and harmonisation of genetic variants from various cohorts.
p.theotokis@imperial.ac.uk
Team Members
Esme Cavanagh
Lara Curran
Lara is a specialist registrar in Cardiology and is undertaking a PhD funded through a British Heart Foundation Centre of Excellence AI in Cardiovascular Science Fellowship. She is interested in precision phenotyping of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), using integration of advancing imaging and genetic data, for improved risk prediction.
Maria Dwornik
Maria is a Cardiology Specialist Registrar and a PhD Clinical Research Fellow. Her research focus is in investigating utility of diffusion tensor cardiovascular magnetic resonance as a novel non-invasive method evaluating cardiac muscle microstructure. Maria's specialist training and research interests are in cardiovascular imaging and inherited cardiomyopathy.
m.dwornik@imperial.ac.uk
Shezan Elahi
Shezan is a research nurse, recruiting patients to the SMARTER-CM Study and the ICONIK study. s.elahi@imperial.ac.uk
Daniel Hammersley
Daniel is a specialist registrar in Cardiology and a PhD clinical research fellow in the group. He is conducting research into novel predictors of left ventricular reverse remodelling and risk in dilated cardiomyopathy.
d.hammersley@rbht.nhs.uk
daniel.hammersley08@imperial.ac.uk
@drdanhamm
Emma Jennings
Emma is a Student Research Assistant doing a year long UROP placement through Imperial College with the Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics group. She will be assisting Rachel Buchan with wet-lab projects and supporting the team with the smooth running of clinical trials and genetic studies.
emma.jennings22@imperial.ac.uk
Katherine Josephs
Kat is a specialist registrar in Clinical Genetics and a Clinical Research Fellow in the Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics group. She is interested in inherited cardiac conditions and plans to pursue a PhD to investigate the genetics of paediatric cardiomyopathy.
kjosephs@imperial.ac.uk
Melpi Kasapi
Melpi completed her PhD in December 2023 on developing machine learning methods for patient stratification and prediction in cardiomyopathies. She used a combination of genomic and cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) data to construct clinically informative machine and deep learning models; as a post-doctoral associate in Imperial's MDR department, Melpi is still finalizing some of her PhD work on polygenic risk scores and multimodal prediction models, among other things.
Michael Lee
Michael is a Postdoctoral Bioinformatician in the group. He is primarily analysing single cell transcriptomics data in order to identify shifts in transcriptional profiles associated with cardiomyopathy.
michael.lee@imperial.ac.uk
Namakau Nakazwe
Namakau is Senior Research Assistant based at the Royal Brompton Campus in the research delivery team, recruiting and collecting data from participants with cardiomyopathy - with a focus on dilated and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
N.Nakazwe@rbht.nhs.uk
Francesco Mazzarotto
Francesco is a Honorary Research Fellow based at the University of Brescia (Italy), where he is a lecturer in medical genetics and a bioinformatician. His current research is mainly focused on understanding the genetic architecture of cardiomyopathies and psychiatric disorders through the analysis of cohorts and families, on developing algorithms that aid the identification of pathogenic variation and contribute to a refinement of current variant interpretation approaches.
f.mazzarotto@imperial.ac.uk
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/f.mazzarotto
@franz_mazz
Massimo Mangino
Jemilat Orlandy
Jemilat is a Band 6 Clinical Research Nurse within the Cardiovascular Genetics and Genomics Group at Imperial College. She supports the recruitment and informed consent of patients with Inherited Cardiac Conditions at the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals. Current research she is working on aims to identify new interventions to treat and prevent inherited cardiomyopathies, focusing specifically on hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathies.
j.orlandy@imperial.ac.uk
George Powell
George is a Clinical Research PhD Fellow in the group. He is interested in the genomics of cardiomyopathy.
george.powell15@imperial.ac.uk
Catherine Renwick
Catherine is a HEE/NIHR Pre-doctoral clinical academic fellow and Consultant Nurse in Paediatric Electrophysiology and Inherited Cardiovascular Conditions at Royal Brompton Hospital. Catherine’s research interest lies in the safety of exercise monitoring and prescription for children diagnosed with arrhythmias, particularly inherited arrhythmias.
crenwick@ic.ac.uk
Prisca Thami
Prisca is a Research Associate in Bioinformatics. Her research focus is investigating the role of rare and common genetic variants in cardiomyopathies.
Sean Zheng
Sean is a Clinical Research PhD Fellow in the group. He is interested in the genomics of cardiomyopathy with a particular focus on evaluating the polygenic contribution of common genetic variation and identification of novel disease causing genes.
sean.zheng17@imperial.ac.uk