Jakub Tomek

Within my Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, I am researching the role of cardiac diabetic remodeling in arrhythmogenesis and pro-arrhythmic drug interactions. To this end, I combine whole-heart experiments, subcellular imaging, and advanced computational simulations of human cardiomyocytes. The project is hosted within the Zaccolo lab.

I am the author of the book Basic Statistics for Life Scientists: a concise handbook of essential techniques that we wrote with David Eisner, also available through Amazon. This aims to give concise and constructive guidance on how to conduct statistical analysis of your data, including the numerous caveats that one should be aware of. Very little mathematics, but hopefully a lot of insight!

I led the development of the three following software tools:

• Computational model of a human ventricular myocyte ToR-ORd, available here. This computational cell model is well-suited for exploring human cardiac physiology and pathophysiology. It can be used to predict drug cardiotoxicity and to better understand how cardiac diseases contribute to the occurrence of arrhythmias.
  
• SparkMaster 2, available here. This is a new user-friendly software for the analysis of calcium sparks and waves. It is distributed as a runnable application, not requiring any installation or specialist knowledge.
• COSMAS, available here. This is a Matlab toolkit for cardiac optical mapping analysis, such as data from Langendorff heart mapping, or cell culture imaging. A Python version is also provided.

I was previously a postdoc in the lab of Prof. Don Bers at UC Davis (investigation of CaMKII function, image processing, computer model development), Prof. Neil Herring at Oxford (experimental investigation of the function of the Neuropeptide Y), and Prof. Blanca Rodriguez (developing computational human electrophysiology models and simulation tools). 

I obtained a DPhil from the Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genomics at the University of Oxford, where I used a combination of experimental, image processing, and computational modelling approaches to study the role of sympathetic nervous innervation in arrhythmogenesis following myocardial infarction.