Dr. Damian Tyler

Biography

Damian Tyler is a Professor of Physiological Metabolism and currently serves as the Director of MR Physics at the Oxford Centre for Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research (OCMR). He has over 20 years of experience in the development and application of Magnetic Resonance Imaging Spectroscopy (MRI/MRS). Tyler earned his MSci in Medical Physics in 1998 and completed his doctorate in 2001 at the University of Nottingham. His research is based in Oxford, focusing on the study of cardiac structure, function, and metabolism in normal and diseased hearts using MRI/MRS. He has been involved in developing advanced techniques that utilize high spatial and temporal resolution CINE imaging to assess heart function and localized phosphorus carbon spectroscopy to monitor and investigate metabolic abnormalities. Notably, he has received British Heart Foundation Intermediate and Senior Research Fellowships to advance Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) techniques aimed at studying cardiac metabolism in the human heart. This work addresses the fundamental limitations of magnetic resonance due to low sensitivity and has led to practical methods that achieve 10,000-fold increases in sensitivity for in vivo molecular imaging. Furthermore, it enables the visualization of 13C-labelled cellular metabolites in vivo, crucial for understanding enzymatic transformations within the tissues.

Research Interests