Fellow
Dr Gareth Matthews
Murray-Edwards is a friendly college set in beautiful gardens with an ethos of equality. The college admits high quality students from all walks of life and cares about their learning
Degrees and honours
- MA (Cantab),
- MB,
- BChir,
- PhD,
- and MSB.
Awards and prizes
- Finalist of the CSAR translational research competition 2013.
- Stanley-Elmore Scholarship, Gonville and Caius College.
- Whitby and Graystone Scholar, Downing College.
- Oon Khye Ch’hia Tsio Award for Preventative Medicine, Downing College.
Research interests
- His research focuses on cardiac arrhythmias, which are irregularities in the heartbeat caused by problems with the electrical activity that excites the heart.
- Arrhythmias prevent the heart from pumping blood around the body leading to approximately 70,000 sudden deaths in the UK per year. Most of these occur following a heart attack, however a minority unfortunately occur in young, often athletic people due to inherited genetic mutations.
- Currently there is no method of accurately identifying patients at risk of dying which leads to difficulties in targeting who should be treated.
- His work has focused on developing new ways to identify these patients using physiological tests. He has developed a new theory known as “Wavelength Restitution” which examines how the electrical activity in the heart adapts to changes in heart rate. It aims to predict when patients might be at risk of unstable changes known as electrical alternans.
- His long-term goal is to develop this theory and hopefully move it to medical practice.
Biography
Dr Matthews came to Cambridge from Harrogate in North Yorkshire to read medicine at Downing College. He then studied at Gonville and Caius College for a PhD under the guidance of Professor Huang, funded by the Wellcome Trust Translational Medicine and Therapeutics Programme. He has been supervising physiology at Murray Edwards since 2009. He is an Academic Foundation Programme doctor, currently practicing at West Suffolk Hospital and Addenbrooke’s. This allows him to practice both as a clinician and a researcher.