Student Name: Lisa Chestnutt
Institution: UCL
Supervisors: Professor Andrew Cook and Professor Peter Lee
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/100479-lisa-chestnutt or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-chestnutt/
I graduated from the University of Glasgow in June 2024 with an integrated master’s degree in biomedical engineering. Throughout my time in Glasgow, I was a member of the University's Women in Engineering society, FemEng, where I got involved with STEM outreach initiatives in local schools. I was also part of Entrepreneurial Scotland’s Saltire Scholar programme, which allowed me the opportunity to spend a summer working in the vertical farming industry as a test engineering intern. In my final year at university, I completed my master’s thesis on a placement with the Children's Cardiovascular Disease department at UCL's Institute of Cardiovascular Science, and I am excited to be back working with the department for my PhD.
I am interested in the application of computational tools in medicine and surgical planning, and in using medical imaging data to create patient-personalised models. I have focussed on cardiovascular applications, and in my master’s thesis I developed an automated finite element simulation framework to model the deployment of an aligning stent to patient-specific total cavopulmonary connection geometries. My PhD research will focus on deep-phenotyping single ventricle disease using synchrotron-based hierarchical phase-contrast tomography (HiP-CT). This high-resolution imaging technique allows fine details to be imaged in explanted whole organs, and I hope to use it to learn more about the underlying mechanisms in single ventricle disease.