Harley Stevenson-Cocks

About

I'm a Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences (though I'm a physiologist by background) at Newcastle University. I'm also the Academic Lead for Employability in biomedical sciences, social media lead for the School, and I look after student placement years too. Teaching-wise, my main job is leading the first year practical skills module (CMB1005), but I teach random bits of physiology, cell biology and pharmacology here and there too.

From a research perspective, I'm a computational cardiologist which basically means I write computer programs that simulate the electrical activity of the heart. Before moving to Newcastle, I worked as a Research Fellow in Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Leeds, which is where I did my PhD too. My PhD project was mainly developing a novel computational model of rat ventricular electrophysiology and calcium to explore how remodelling associated with heart failure can be pro-arrhythmic. I did my undergraduate degree in BSc Human Physiology at the University of Leeds too.

Outside of work, I enjoy listening to music and going to gigs (mainly heavy metal), playing and watching rugby (I'm a Northampton Saints and England fan), and taking my dog, Nessie (a cockapoo/lakeland terrier cross), out for adventures in Northumberland and beyond.

Research

My research interests are in the use of computational models of cardiac electrophysiology and calcium handling to explore how pro-arrhythmic activity arises from remodelling associated with disease states (such as heart failure), whether exercise ameliorates or alters such activity, and the use of experimental techniques (such as optical mapping and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging) to complement and validate such models.

I'm also interested in pedagogical research, and am passionate about teaching and maximising the student learning experience. My PhD was funded through a demonstrating studentship and I was fortunate enough to gain Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy during my PhD (full Fellowship pending!).

Publications

• Sub-cellular heterogeneity in SERCA determines spatial calcium dynamics in cardiomyocytes (Biophysical Journal, 2020).
• Multi-scale approaches for the simulation of cardiac electrophysiology: II - tissue-level structure and function (Methods, 2020).
• Inward rectifier current downregulation promotes spontaneous calcium release in a novel model of rat ventricular electrophysiology (Computing in Cardiology, 2018).

Contributions

• Investigation of the role of myocyte orientations in cardiac arrhythmia using image-based models (Biophysical Journal, 2019).
• Institutional and technological barriers to the use of open educational resources (OERs) in physiology and medical education (Advances in Physiology Education, 2017).

Blog

• 9th June 2022 - Even more belated updates...

  As a bit of a distraction/break from marking, I thought it would be about time to return to this webpage and try to actually update it (and keep on top of it - anyone who's ever tried "blogging" will sympathise, I'm sure). So here goes...

  I guess the first update is that I'm now employed permanently as a lecturer at Newcastle University! I was originally employed on a maternity cover contract for 14 months, so uprooting from Leeds and moving to Newcastle in the middle of a pandemic for a temporary contract was a pretty big gamble, but I'm delighted it paid off. I love my job (stressful as it can be at times) and I'm very thankful that I managed to somehow convince the right people that it would be worth keeping me on board!

  With the new job came some new responsibilities, and I've also taken on the role of Academic Lead for Employability in biomedical sciences, which means I liaise with the Careers Service a lot and try to encourage students to think beyond the curriculum and engage in a range of employability boosting opportunities too. I'm keeping hold of the social media stuff too which means whenever you see content on the School's social media channels (we're on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram FYI) it's usually come from me...

  Lastly (for now), I'm also in the middle of organising some equipment to hopefully kickstart my research career again, so fingers crossed I can acquire myself a decent PC to power my research! I've also got fingers crossed my abstract gets accepted for Europhysiology 2022 in September - always wanted to go to Copenhagen so what better excuse than a good ol' Physiological Society conference!

• 22nd April 2021 - Belated updates!

  It's been a while since my last post... nearly a year - how time flies! It's been a busy year to say the least.
  At some point soon, I hope to update this website properly, making it a bit more user-friendly and giving it a thematic makeover. I also intend to update a bit more regularly... we'll see how that goes!

• 6th May 2020 - Strange times, new job!

  I'm delighted to be starting a new role as Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at Newcastle University. I'm very much looking forward to meeting new colleagues and students and getting stuck in! That being said, in these unusual times, I'm having to start remotely and am in fact still in Leeds. Fingers crossed that a return to normality can come sooner rather than later, and that the measures we've taken globally can help to eliminate the threat of COVID-19. For now, thanks be to Zoom for allowing me to virtually meet new colleagues - time to start preparing for the forthcoming academic year!

• 16th March 2020 - Methods paper

  The full-text PDF of our Methods paper "Multi-scale approaches for the simulation of cardiac electrophysiology: II - Tissue-level structure and function" is now available online. Click here to view, and marvel at our mathematical and scientific wizardry!

• 27th February 2020 - NCRG

  I'm looking forward to this year's Northern Cardiovascular Research Group (NCRG) meeting, on the 7th April at the University of Bradford. Always good to catch up with cardiovascular researchers from other UK universities (not exclusively Northern ones, despite the name!), and socialise. For updates and information, check out the NCRG website, kindly hosted by Cairn Research.

• 21st February 2020 - Twitter

  I've set myself up a proper professional Twitter account to fully engage with science chat on social media. Follow @harleyjsc to stay up to date!

• 7th February 2020 - The GOD Command

  The University of Leeds' supercomputer system, ARC, has massive amounts of short-term storage that isn't backed up, so is only useful for temporary storage of data. The filesystem is checked once a week, and files unused for 90 days are automatically deleted. This is good because it encourages people to transfer their data elsewhere, freeing up space and speeding up the system (a while back, the storage was over 90% full and it meant simulations took ages to run). However, sometimes it's handy to keep stuff on ARC because, for example, it's part of a running project that you're not ready to transfer the data for yet. So, we figured out a handy command to run that will recursively go through your files, directories and subdirectories, and 'touch' them (which is Linux speak for updating the 'last modified date' property of the file). We call this majestic command The God Command:
  find . -exec touch {} \;

• 4th February 2020 - Handy Linux commands (grep, sed, awk)

  grep
  Often I find myself wanting to search for which files in my current directory (and subdirectories) contain a particular word or phrase (for example, a variable used in various C files). To do so:
  grep -rn . -e 'text'
  grep is the command, -rn means recursively and show the line number (add -w to match the whole word), . is for the present directory (and all subdirectories) and 'text' (including the quote marks) is the text you want to find.

  awk
  The modelling framework I use gives me output files with over 40 columns, each of which containing different variables. Sometimes I want to copy these output files from one place to another (usually, off the supercomputer to my local machine) but am only interested in a few columns, so to save time copying large files across, you can use awk to cut out particular columns:
  awk '{print $1,$3,$7}' file > out
  The above command prints columns 1, 3 and 7 from file to a new file out, which will be a much smaller file so faster to copy.

  sed
  Similarly, to cut particular lines from a file into a new file:
  sed -n '100,200p,201q' file > out
  This will cut lines 100 to 200 from file and print them to the new file out.

• 3rd February 2020 (2) - New publication!

  Our new paper is now available online, entitled "Multi-scale approaches for the simulation of cardiac electrophysiology: II - tissue-level structure and function". It's part 2 (part 1 not yet available) of a duo of papers detailed the methods underlying computational modelling of cardiac electrophysiology. Enjoy!

• 3rd February 2020 (1) - Website begins

  So I've decided to start a website in an attempt to organise my thoughts, work, and anything else I feel I should write down and keep a record of (might well just be recipes that I always lose track of!). And here it is! I've adapted a template from HTML5up, which is an excellent resource for anyone looking to work from a HTML template rather than relying on apps/programs/online website builders. Anyway, that's the introductory blog post done, now to try and populate some more of the website...

Contact

Feel free to contact me by email, or by checking out my profiles below.

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• GitHub

Elements

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