Royal Society award for heart and breast research

University of Auckland engineer Associate Professor Martyn Nash has won the prestigious James Cook Fellowship to further his research into the heart and the breast.

The $220,000 Royal Society of New Zealand award allows Dr Nash, of the Department of Engineering Science and a member of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, to spend two years focusing solely on his research. The fellowship is awarded to "forward thinking" researchers who can make a significant contribution to New Zealand’s knowledge base.

Dr Nash uses advanced computer modelling techniques to understand the biology of the human body and better inform diagnoses and treatment of life threatening illnesses. Dr Nash will use the fellowship to concentrate on ventricular fibrillation and breast cancer.

He aims to develop an anatomically realistic computer model of the human heart to study ventricular fibrillation – an uncontrolled twitching of the muscles in the heart’s lower chamber. Ventricular fibrillation, often caused by a heart attack, can kill a person in minutes and accounts for nearly half of all deaths in New Zealand.

“Understanding the drivers of this condition may lead to new treatments to prevent or eliminate it,” Dr Nash says

His second goal is to develop a realistic 3D computer model of the breast based on medical imaging to help clinicians better detect and diagnose breast cancer.

“Recent advances in biological modelling and supercomputing has enabled the development of new techniques to model human organs and significantly improve our ability to treat and diagnose life threatening illnesses,” Dr Nash says.

The Auckland Bioengineering Institute is known worldwide for its pioneering work developing sophisticated computer models of organs, particularly of the heart and breast. Dr Nash also has close affiliations with the Oxford University in the UK, where he spent six years as a Post-doctoral Research Scientist after completing his PhD at The University of Auckland. Dr Nash is the third member of Department of Engineering Science since 1996 to be awarded such a fellowship. The other James Cook Fellowship winners were Professor Peter Hunter in 1999 (now director of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute) and Professor Andrew Pullan in 2003 (now Head of the Department of Engineering Science).

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