Introduction
The British Cardiovascular Society (BCS)/British Heart Foundation (BHF)/British Atherosclerosis Society/British Society for Cardiovascular Research Young Investigator Award was established in 2001. The competition is open to both clinicians and basic scientists, no more than 5 years post-PhD. In 2025, 5 finalists were selected from a pool of 30 applicants, to present their work and address questions from a panel of independent judges at the BCS Annual Conference 2025 (Manchester, 2–4 June 2025). This year’s finalists conducted research highlighting the range of cutting-edge techniques currently employed in cardiovascular research. Profiles of each finalist and their shortlisted research project are presented below.
Winner: Dr Daniel Taylor
Dr Daniel Taylor is a Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) (figure 1). He joined the University of Sheffield in 2020, completing an intercalated Master of Research in Cardiovascular Science, before finishing his undergraduate training at Lancaster Medical School. In both degrees, he graduated first in his year and was the recipient of the University of Sheffield Cumberland Award and the Lancaster University Chancellor’s Medal. He then completed Foundation Training at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2024. Dr Taylor’s primary research interests are in angiography-derived computational modelling of blood flow and vascular morphometric scaling, for which he is supervised by Dr Paul Morris, Professor Ian Halliday and Professor Julian Gunn.
Dr Taylor presented a series of studies outlining the development, optimisation and application of a computational model for quantifying coronary microvascular resistance (MVR). These included the development of a method for regionalising flow to all side branches within a major artery,1 2 sensitivity analyses to identify the most important parameters for model optimisation and a meta-analysis to find the optimal relationship between flow and diameter in bifurcating coronary arteries.3 The model was then validated against invasive data4 …
