Professor Steve Greenwald, BA, PhD

Profile

Following a BA in Natural Science at Hertford College Oxford and a PhD in Medicine (Pathology) from Guy's Hospital Medical School, Steve Greenwald obtained a British Heart Foundation Junior Research Fellowship working on arterial elasticity in children. This was followed by a position as research assistant in the Pathology Department of The London Hospital Medical College. He has been on the academic staff of The Medical College since 1980 and obtained a personal chair in Cardiovascular Mechanics in 2001. Between 2002 and 2016 he was head of intercalated degrees and an Associate. He was elected as the Vice President of the International Society of Pathophysiology in 2006 and holds visiting professorships in Thailand and China.

Centre:  Cell Biology and Cutaneous Research.

Teaching

• Module lead: cardiovascular pathophysiology, intercalated degree in experimental pathology. Lectures and project supervision
• Project supervision for Biomedical Science BSc
• Special Study Components, years 2 and 4. Various topics, including, foetal programming of metabolic disease, measurement and clinical importance of vascular endothelial function
• PBL facilitation, Cardio-respiratory, HSPH etc.
• Topics for PhD supervision:
  • Effect of age on arterial mechanical properties, wave propagation in soft tissue, assessment of vascular graft/stent mechanical properties.
• Annual lecture series on Cardiovascular mechanics and vascular physiology. Summer School for Biomechanics, North Eastern University, Shenyang, China.

Research

Research Interests:

The causes of cardiovascular disease are diverse, but during the last two decades, the importance of mechanical factors in their pathogenesis has become widely recognised. For instance, changing stiffness of the large arteries is a powerful prognostic indicator of mortality and morbidity for hypertension, stroke and coronary heart disease. Our research activities are aimed at a better understanding of the relationship between arterial composition, structure and mechanical function and range from mathematical modelling of the shear waves resulting from disturbed blood flow, through investigation of impaired vascular function in patients with diabetes and thalassaemia, to understanding how fatigue failure of elastin in adult life contributes to hypertension associated with impaired growth in-utero. On the applied side, recent work has been concerned with the development of novel methods for the measurement of arterial function including the activity of matrix metallo proteases, investigating the haemodynamic properties of novel stent/grafts and the non-invasive and indeed non-contact measurement of arterial stiffness and vascular endothelial function. These ideas are propagated to students undertaking the intercalated degree in experimental pathology as part of the teaching in the CV Pathophysiology module.

Recent projects

• EU Horizon 2020.CARDIS. Early stage CARdio Vascular Disease Detection with Integrated Silicon Photonics
• QM LSI Digital Fellow CAP-AI Prediction of aortic changes from surveillance magnetic resonance imaging in congenital ascending aortic aneurysm
• EPSRC. Computational Diagnosis of Arterial Stenoses. (With DR. S. Shaw, Applied Mathematics, Brunel University)

Ongoing research

• QMUL POC Fund. Multi-sensor array for the acoustic localisation of coronary artery disease
  

Publications

Key Publications

Wang Q, Xu L, Wang L, Yang X, Sun Y, Yang B, Greenwald, S.E. Automatic coronary artery segmentation of CCTA images using UNet with a local contextual transformer. Frontiers in Physiology. 2023;14., doi: 10.3389/fphys.2023.1138257

Zhang B, Li H, Xu L, Qi L, Yao Y, Greenwald SE ( 2021 ). Noncontact Heart Rate Measurement Using a Webcam, Based on Joint Blind Source Separation and a Skin Reflection Model: For a Wide Range of Imaging Conditions. Journal of Sensors vol. 2021, 10.1155/2021/9995871

Zheng, D., Yao, Y., Morrison, I., & Greenwald, S. (2021). Photoplethysmographic assessment of arterial stiffness and endothelial function. In J. Allen, & P. Kyriacou (Eds.), Photoplethysmography: Technology, Signal Analysis and Applications (pp. 235-276). Elsevier. Advance online publication. 10.1016/B978-0-12-823374-0.00007-4

Zhang Y, Jiang Z, Qi L, Xu L, Sun X, Chu X, et al. Evaluation of Cardiorespiratory Function during Cardiopulmonary Exercise Test in Untreated Hypertensive and Healthy Subjects. Frontiers in Physiology. 2018;9. 10.3389%2Ffphys.2018.01590

Timmins LH, Wu Q, Yeh AT, Moore JE, Jr., Greenwald SE. Structural inhomogeneity and fiber orientation in the inner arterial media. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol. 2010 May 1, 2010;298(5):H1537-45.

All Publications