Bio
Matt is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, focussing on 3D computer vision techniques applied to cancer biology. He is also a visiting researcher at Imperial College London and The Francis Crick Institute. Matt obtained a BSc (Hons) degree in statistics from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and an MSc in artificial intelligence from the University of Southampton.
Matt’s research attempts to predict the heterogeneous response to therapy in 3D cancer models and to use this knowledge to design novel therapies targeting resistant cells. Matt has started a company called Sentinal 4D which aims to predict the likelihood of success of cancer drugs in clinical trials based on the morphology of drug-treated cancer models. He has been awarded Cancer Tech Accelerator grant funding and has been shortlisted for the Cancer Research Horizons Early-Career Entrepreneur of the Year award. Aside from science, Matt is an avid swimmer, runner and cyclist who is undertaking the Ironman 70.3 in June 2023.
Research interests
Matt’s research attempts to predict the heterogeneous response to therapy in 3D cancer models and to use this knowledge to design novel therapies targeting resistant cells. This will shed light on previously unknown biology, allowing better cancer therapy and ultimately saving lives. He will do this through spatio-temporal graph attention networks on 3D + time imaging data of cancer organoids before and after treatments currently used in clinical trials. This model will be used to predict which individual cell will respond to treatment and which morphological features of a cell or its interactions are meaningful in the prediction. Matt is looking to achieve strong collaborations with those interested in developing and applying novel and explainable 3D computer vision techniques to microscopy data. Furthermore, Matt is interested in collaborating on work associated with his start-up with the goal of rapidly screening new cancer therapies using artificial intelligence.