2024 George E Brown Memorial Lecturer - Jeffery D. Molkentin, PhD

Jeffery D. Molkentin, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital. He is division director of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology and co-director of the Heart Institute. He received a PhD from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1994 and performed postdoctoral training with Dr. Eric Olson in Texas from 1994-97, followed by his first faculty appointment in 1997 at Cincinnati Children’s.

Dr. Molkentin has published more than 445 original articles over his career, with a Scopus H-index of 131 and Google Scholar H-index of 158, with publications in Cell, Science and Nature. Dr. Molkentin was a full investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2008-21.

Dr. Molkentin has placed 35-plus of his past trainees into academics as laboratory principal investigators and another 30-plus as leading scientists in the pharmaceutical industry and biotechnology. Dr. Molkentin has also graduated 13 PhD or MD/PhD students from his laboratory.

His research program focuses on cardiovascular and skeletal muscle disease with an emphasis on defining the molecular mechanisms that underlie mitochondrial-dependent cell death and metabolism. His laboratory also investigates intracellular signaling pathways that control cellular growth, differentiation, autophagy/atrophy and proliferation in cardiac and skeletal muscle. His laboratory is attempting to identify novel secreted protein factors from the heart and skeletal muscle that control disease responsiveness. His laboratory studies the cardiac and skeletal muscle fibroblast and how it functions during disease to alter the extracellular matrix and tissue remodeling. His laboratory investigates the cellular mechanisms underlying cardiac repair through effects of the immune response in the heart and how it alters healing and fibroblast activity.

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