Dr. Eylem Levelt

United Kingdom

Research Award2022 Escalator Awards

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WINNER BIO

Eylem Levelt, DPhil (Oxon) MBBS MRCP FHEA, Wellcome Trust Clinical Career Development Fellow and Associate Professor in Cardiology at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), is an academic cardiologist with a special interest in cardiac metabolism and advanced cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging techniques including spectroscopy, perfusion imaging, and oxygen-sensitive imaging.

Her research focuses on testing novel treatment strategies by monitoring the heart’s response to treatment using imaging biomarkers for guiding clinical treatment in patients with type 2 diabetes and patients with common cardiovascular conditions including inherited cardiac diseases or valve diseases who have type 2 diabetes comorbidity. The medium and long-term goals of her program of research are to emphasise diabetes comorbidity among the risk stratification and treatment strategies in cohorts of patients with inherited cardiac disease and surgical valve disease to improve prognostic accuracy of risk scores, to facilitate targeted therapeutic approaches and consequently improve clinical outcomes.

In addition, Dr Levelt has a long-standing interest in promoting early detection and prevention of cardiovascular diseases in young women to address substantial gender difference in the prevalence and burden of cardiovascular disease. She has set up a pioneering prospective case-control cardiometabolic imaging study with her collaborators in Departments of Endocrinology and Obstetrics at the University of Leeds and Leeds Teaching Hospitals to address the substantial void in the current understanding of the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease in women with obstetric complications including those with preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. The goal of this program of research is to make a step change in the treatment of women with obstetric complications, and to tackle the issue of disparities in the cardiovascular health care women receive.

Dr Levelt pursued her DPhil studies at the University of Oxford, where she received rigorous training in MR techniques and produced a portfolio of research involving CMR, Proton and Phosphorus-MR Spectroscopy, as well as cardiac metabolism. She is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology and was awarded an ESC educational grant from the European Heart Academy as a future leader in cardiology for the MSc in Clinical Trials at the University of Oxford. She has instigated multiple research studies as principal investigator, and successfully obtained research grant income from multiple grant bodies including the Wellcome Trust, Diabetes UK, the British Heart Foundation, Health Education England and the Medical Research Council. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy whose PhD students have been awarded multiple national and international prizes including the prestigious Early Career Melvin Judkins Award at the American Heart Association Scientific Meeting and the British Cardiovascular Society Highest Ranking Imaging Award.