Matthew Vella is a Research Support Officer II (RSOII) in the TargetMI project. He is also a PhD candidate with the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Malta. His research is dedicated to identifying genetic variants responsible for increasing the risk of Myocardial Infarction and eventually identifying drug targets that reduce this risk. As part of his PhD, he has been working for over 3 years on the multi-omic data from the Maltese Acute Myocardial Infarction (MAMI) study. He has contributed significantly to the generation and collection of 3 data layers: whole genome sequencing, whole blood transcriptome sequencing and the 10-year follow-up study.
He has also worked as an RSO II in two major projects at the University of Malta the “TargetID” project in which the aim was to identify drug targets to reduce the severity of COVID-19 infections, and recently in the BioGeMT ERA chair team as a bioinformatics early researcher. As part of these projects and his PhD, he has been developing a bioinformatics skillset necessary for analysing the big data challenges encountered in multi-omics studies.
Matthew has developed his molecular biology background from his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Chemistry which he attained at the University of Malta in 2017 and also from an Erasmus+ experience at the Academisch Medisch Centrum (AMC) in the Netherlands. He also has a strong background in Molecular Chemistry in which he graduated with distinction from a Master's Degree.
