About
My name is Dominic Whittaker, and I currently work as a Manager (R&D Scientist) in Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP) at GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) in the Clinical Pharmacology Modelling & Simulation department. This entails the integration and interpretation of data from many sources to inform development and validation of mechanistic disease models linking biological pathways to clinical endpoints. Using PK/PD and QSP models we are able to generate and make predictions from virtual patient populations to help drive project decisions in drug discovery and development across a range of drug modalities.
Previously I worked as a Senior Research Fellow with Gary Mirams at the Centre for Mathematical Medicine & Biology in the School of Mathematics at the University of Nottingham, UK. During this time, my research focused primarily on electrophysiology and pharmacology of the heart, from the ion channel to the tissue level. In other words, I worked on the development of computer models of the electrical activity of the heart, in order to understand the mechanisms underlying abnormal rhythms of the heart (known as cardiac arrhythmias).
Before moving to Nottingham, I obtained a PhD in the Biological Physics department at the University of Manchester, UK, with a thesis entitled Pathophysiology and Pharmacology of Short QT Syndrome Gene Mutations in the Human Atria: Insights from Multi-Scale Computational Modelling. I was subsequently awarded a Wellcome Trust ISSF early career fellowship (Relating cardiac tissue structure to normal and arrhythmic excitation patterns: towards patient-specific computational models) at the University of Leeds, UK, where I worked on modelling and mapping cardiac excitation patterns in the Leeds Computational Physiology Lab.