Our People

Dr Hector Martinez-Navarro

Fellow, Junior Research Fellow

Senior Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of Computer Science

 DPhil (Oxford); MSc; MSc; BSc

Hector Martinez-Navarro comes from Valencia, Spain. His background is multidisciplinary, including a BSc and MSc in Computer Science, and a second MSc in Human Physiology. In 2019 he obtained his DPhil degree at Oxford in the Computational Cardiovascular Science (CCS) group, at the Department of Computer Science. In the following years, he held a Postdoctoral Fellow position at the Oslo University Hospital and finally, in October 2022, he returned to the CCS group as a Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Currently, he supervises his  first doctoral student, and he has demonstrated in several courses at the Doctoral Training Centre at the University over the past few years. His experience in tutoring is very extensive, and he enjoys research dissemination and outreach activities.

His current research focuses on exploiting computer simulations of cardiac electrophysiology to investigate the dynamics of cardiac arrhythmias and their potential relevance to clinical intervention. This project is conducted in alliance with Zoll Medical Corporation, a medical company centred on the development of cardiac resuscitation devices. In more detail, he will investigate how the metabolic alterations arising during ventricular fibrillation may change the electrical properties of the tissue and hence modulate the electrocardiographic signal, critically relevant in the management of these patients. However, the outcome of this project is not limited to providing mechanistic insights into the formation of arrhythmias; it is an essential aspect of this research to produce knowledge on how to improve the use of electrocardiographic data during resuscitation protocols, given that optimal timing of defibrillation shocks correlates with higher survival rates.