Interview with Dr. Gary Tse (Bayés-ECG Award, 2018)
Dr. Tse was the first recipient of the Bayés-ECG award, ICE 2018, Chiba, Japan. This interview was performed by Göksel Çinier.
(Q1) How did you decide to apply for the Bayés-ECG award?
For the past few years, I have been an active contributor to the Journal of Electrocardiology, both as an author and as a reviewer. It was through this platform that I met Prof. Adrian Baranchuk, who suggested that I might like to try for the award. I wasn’t sure whether I should apply, especially with the age limit of 35, I thought my track record might not be sufficient. However, I had nothing to lose by trying.
(Q2) Please describe your feelings when you learned that you had been named the winner of the first Bayés-ECG award?
So it took me by surprise when I received an email from the organizers that I was selected. I was ecstatic! It was exciting, not only because it is an acknowledgement for myself but also for the people I have worked with. This Award is for them as much as it is for me.
(Q3) Can you tell us more about your research interests and career goals?
Since my undergraduate days back in 2008, I have been fascinated by cardiac electrophysiology. Our current interests are working towards a better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie atrial and ventricular arrhythmias. As a new principal investigator with minimal start-up funding, it is very difficult to have sustained research output without support. However, with the help of supportive colleagues and hard-working team members, we are pleased to have contributed significantly over the past year or so to the literature. In future years, I hope to expand our basic and translational research team and run a multidisciplinary research programme involving basic scientists, engineers, computational biologists and clinicians to better understand the processes underlying cardiac arrhythmias.
(Q4) What was the best ECG paper that you have recently read?
It was a paper on “New Electrocardiographic Features in Brugada Syndrome” published in Current Cardiology Reviews. In this review, it neatly lays out the differences between type 1 and non-type 1 Brugada patterns. I keep referring back to this document!
(Q5) ISE has recently started a new initiative called the ISE Young Community, of which you are an executive committee member. How do you see your role in this initiative?
Mentorship occupies most of my working time, as a mentor and mentee myself. My roles will be to involve younger students with no experience into academic (indeed electrocardiology) research. Whilst students initially lack the experience and skillset for research, if properly mentored by us and through peer-learning, they can achieve the same outputs as full-time students and researchers. As part of the students’ research learning, we provide training for conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which enables students to appreciate the importance of critically reviewing the literature in an unbiased manner. At the same time, participating students also benefit from being able to publish their own publications in their learning process. They will then equipped with the skillset for conducting their own original studies. My key philosophy is the importance of bi-directional nature of mentorship focusing on collaborative learning: learning goes both ways. I hope that through this mentorship model, students will be able to contribute to ISE and the mentors will find this rewarding, too.
(Q6) What would be your advice for other young researchers?
Speak to any of us for potential projects. Teamwork makes everything much more easily to achieve.