Science News from BCVS 2023

Program Chair Sumanth Prabhu, MD and Vice Chair Farah Sheikh, PhD interview Eric Olson, PhD about his keynote lecture, "Thinking Big and Thinking Small about the Heart" and about distinguished career in molecular biology.

Moderator Paola Rosas, PhD interviews Elizabeth McNally, MD, PhD about her presentation on the use of genetic testing not only to diagnose cardiomyopathy and to understand the genetic causes of the disease but also to help identify patients at risk for particular conditions and identifying the proper drug therapies for them based on their specific genetic profiles.

Moderator Nenad Bursac, PhD interviews Minxia Gu, Md, PhD about her work deriving organoids and endothelial cell models from human iPSCs for the study of congenital heart disease.

Moderator Paola Rosas, PhD interviews Julian Stelzer, PhD about his work looking at different proteins that regulate myosin in hopes of better understanding the underlying mechanisms that contribute to heart failure.

Annet Kirabo, PhD, moderator of session 9 on cardio-immunology and heart disease interviews Pilar Alcaide, PhD who spoke about her work on the role of T cell immune responses in heart remodelling and Susan Sattler, MSc, PhD who spoke on the role dendritic cells in cardiac injury.

Moderator Susan E. Howlett, PhD, Dalhousie University interviews George Kararigas, PhD about his presentation on "Sex-biased Mechanisms of Stress-induced Cardiac Remodelling."

Susan E. Howlett, PhD, one of the moderators of Session 11 on Taking Sex Differences to Heart—From Basic to Clinical interviews Iris Jaffe, MD, PhD who spoke about sex differences in the role of mineralocorticoidreceptors in atherosclerosis.

Moderator Irene Turnbull, PhD, Mount Sinai interviews two speakers from session 9 on arrhythmogenic cardiac disease, Sean Wu, MD, PhD , who spoke about his work on "Comprehensive Mapping of Cardiac Enhancers in the Developing Heart" and Francisco Alvarado, PhD, who presented on "RyR2 Dysfunction in Cardiomyopathy."

Moderator Chunhui Xu, PhD interviews Rong Lu, PhD about her work using lentiviral barcoding and high throughput sequencing to track how hematopoietic stem cells differ from one another in blood production and how they work together to regenerate a balanced blood supply.

Moderators Aikaterini Kontrogianni-Konstantopoulos, PhD and Nicole Purcell, PhD introduce Haobo Li, PhD,  Qiongxin Wang, PhD,  and Asma Boukhalfa, PhD,  finalists for the BCVS 2023 Outstanding Early Career Award Competition who briefly describe the research they submitted. The winner this year was Haboa Li, PhD from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School for his work, "Cardiomyocyte DCHS2 Inhibition Protects Against Heart Failure."

Moderator Anja Karlstaedt, MD, PhD interviews two speakers from Session 13, Robert Weiss, MD, who spoke about his work investigating how impaired energy metabolism contributes to arrhythmias, and graduate student Omar Brito-Estada, who presented his work looking at Dworf overexpression in the heart and mitochondrial function.