2024 Excellence Award for Hypertension Research Lecture

Dr. Bina Joe is a distinguished professor, chairperson of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and the founding director of the Center for Hypertension at the University of Toledo.

She is an internationally recognized leader in hypertension research. In her 24-year career, she has published over 170 articles and six book chapters. Her laboratory was the first to use CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to positionally clone genes and noncoding variants causing hypertension.

More recent pioneering discoveries of her laboratory include the discovery of gut microbiota as a key contributor to blood pressure regulation; the ketone body betahydroxybutyrate as an antihypertensive metabolite; the link between energy metabolism and hypertension; applying artificial intelligence/machine learning to classify people with cardiovascular diseases based on their microbiome; and engineering microbiota as therapy for hypertension.

Dr. Joe is the first Asian American woman to receive the Harriet Dustan Award, Lewis K. Dahl Memorial Lecture Award, Ernest Starling Award from the American Physiological Society and the Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Hypertension.

She is the editor-in-chief of Microbiota and Host, a new journal affiliated with the European Society for Endocrinology. 

Dr. Joe is also interested in Indian classical dance and has graduated many students in this art. She serves as a board of trustees member of the Greater Toledo Community Foundation.

Dr. Joe is married to Dr. Venkatesha Basrur, a faculty member at the University of Michigan, and mother of two, Abhijith (28) and Megan (19).