Alessandra GHIGO received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences and Oncology from University of Torino (Italy) in 2012. During the PhD, she was a Visiting Fellow at Université Paris-Sud 11 (France) in the Laboratory of Signaling and Cardiac Pathophysiology, where she focused on the cross-talk between phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) and cyclic nucleotide signaling pathways in heart failure, particularly in ventricular arrhythmias. Since 2020, she is Associate Professor of Experimental Biology at the Department of Molecular Biotechnology and Health Sciences at the University of Torino (Italy). Her current research interest focuses on the comprehension of the molecular mechanisms underlying the cardiotoxicity of anti-cancer therapies, with a major focus on metabolic alterations and the contribution of PI3K signaling. She is the author of more than 90 publications on top-notched peer-reviewed journals in the field of cardiology, including Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Science Translational Medicine, and Molecular Cell.

Prof. Moretti (b. 1967) works in the fields of stem cell biology and cardiac development. Her research focuses are 1) cardiovascular progenitors and their specification into the various heart cell lineages, 2) cellular plasticity, and 3) human induced pluripotent stem cells as model systems for studying cardiovascular disease and regeneration.

Since 2015 she is Chair of Regenerative Medicine in Cardiovascular Disease at TUM.

Alicia D’Souza is a cardiac physiologist and a British Heart Foundation Intermediate Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Alicia’s laboratory investigates ion channel remodelling in health and disease, focusing on the cardiac conduction system. The team adopts an integrative approach - combining classical whole-organism-, organ-, tissue- and cellular electrophysiology (in humans, large and small animal models) with cutting-edge omics, imaging and gene delivery technologies to investigate conventional, as well as novel pathways of ion channel regulation. Alicia’s work on the mechanisms that underlie bradyarrhythmia in athletes and in the circadian rhythm has been popularised in the media and led to numerous awards including an ISHR Servier Research Fellowship Award.

My lab is interested in the mechanisms that control vascular damage and how to influence repair and regeneration of the vascular system using innovative therapies, including gene-, cell- and RNA-based approaches. Focusing on vascular smooth muscle and endothelial cells, we are defining the non-coding RNA pathways and networks that influence cell function in health and disease and developing interventions to influence beneficially repair and regeneration. We additionally have focus on gene therapy, both in the translational and basic sense. We have developed an innovative gene therapy approach to prevent pathological vascular remodelling associated with coronary artery bypass graft failure and are pursuing this at the clinical interface. We are also generating endothelial cells from human embryonic stem cells for regeneration in ischaemic conditions, and developing an understanding in mechanisms that control endothelial cell commitment and specification.

Anna Zoccarato obtained her BSc and MSc in Biotechnology from the University of Padova (Italy). She then pursued her PhD at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Prof Manuela Zaccolo. Following her doctoral studies, she joined the lab of Prof Ajay Shah at King's College London as a Research Associate, where she focused on investigating the role of NADPH oxidase 4 (NOX4) in modulating cardiac metabolism in response to stress. Currently, Anna is a Research Fellow at King's College London, where her primary research interest lies in exploring the contribution of changes in cardiac metabolism, particularly glucose anabolic pathways, to pathological cardiac remodelling. In her investigations, she employs a comprehensive range of methodologies, including the utilization of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), engineered heart tissue (EHTs), molecular biology techniques, metabolomics, and extracellular flux analysis.

Bianca Brundel received her PhD from the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands and was trained in molecular and cellular biology (VU, Amsterdam) and clinical pharmacology (UMCG). Bianca is professor at the physiology department at the Amsterdam UMC, location VU University Medical Center. Her research is focused on the molecular mechanisms driving proteostasis derailment and pathophysiology of atrial fibrillation. Molecular findings are used to identify novel druggable targets. Her laboratory utilizes experimental cardiomyocyte and Drosophila cardiac disease models in combination with genetic and pharmacological interventions. She is project leader of translational research projects and co-founder of the Atrial Fibrillation Innovation Platform, to promote translational studies in co-creation with patients, and the Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab to develop bio-electrical diagnostic tools. As such, she contributed to forwarding candidate drugs into (pre-)clinical proof-of-principle studies.

Borja Ibáñez (Madrid, 1975) combines research activities as Group Leader at the CNIC with clinical activities as interventional cardiologist at the University Hospital Fundación Jiménez Díaz. He is also Scientific Director and Director of the Clinical Research Department at CNIC and Group Leader at CIBERCV network.

He was trained in Spain and in USA (Mount Sinai Heart, NY). His research is at the verge of basic and clinical arena, mainly in the fields of MI, heart failure and lately to cancer therapy-induced cardiotoxicity.

He is PI of several multicenter clinical trials recruiting patients with myocardial infarction and heart failure, including the megatrial REBOOT, as well of PI coordinator of several national and international projects.

He has published more than 300 scientific publications in high-impact journals and has received numerous awards for his scientific merits.

He participates in peer review activities and he is member of the editorial board of several top cardiovascular journals.

Brenda Kwak is a full professor in the Department of Pathology and Immunology at the University of Geneva Medical School. After her medical studies at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, she has joined the gap junction research field as a PhD student and has not left it since. In 2003, she established her research group in Switzerland supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation professorship. Her research principally focuses on the role of intercellular communication via connexin and pannexin channels in cardiovascular inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis and cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury. More recently, she has extended her research interests towards translational research investigating the role of biomechanical forces in neurovascular disease.

Christopher Loughrey BVMS PhD, is Professor of Experimental Cardiology at the University of Glasgow Cardiovascular Research Centre, International Dean for the College of Medical Veterinary & Life Sciences (MVLS), and Deputy Head of the School of Veterinary Medicine. He is a Principal Investigator on a BHF programme grant and has held a number of project grants funded by the Medical Research Council, British Heart Foundation, Heart Research UK, Medical Research Scotland and Chief Scientist Office. He is currently the Executive Deputy Editor of Cardiovascular Research and has served on the Editorial board of the British Journal of Pharmacology and Frontiers in Physiology; Cardiac Electrophysiology. His group have expertise in identifying and characterising new therapeutic targets for the treatment of adverse cardiac remodelling in the context of myocardial infarction and heart failure.

Christopher O'Shea is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research interests center on the use of cardiac mapping data to better understand cardiac arrhythmias. A particular focus of Dr O'Shea's research is the development of novel, open-source, analysis approaches and tools for both pre-clinal and clinical mapping data.

Claire Arnaud (Inserm researcher) leads an innovative research addressing the mechanisms of cardiometabolic consequences of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome. She is particularly interested in the role of intermittent hypoxia (IH), a hallmark feature of OSA, which is recognized as the most deleterious factor in term of cardiovascular and metabolic complications of OSA. She has a solid experience in the field of cardiovascular pathology and a strong background in rodent models. In HP2 team, she also actively participated in the development of a hypoxic platform (HypE platform), which allows translational research on the pathophysiological consequences of hypoxia in various models and diseases.

Daan Westenbrink is a cardiologist and a translational scientist at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands. He studied medicine and completed a PhD program at the University of Groningen and conducted a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California San Diego, USA. He is also licensed as a clinical pharmacologist and is ESC certified in heart failure, cardiac device therapy and cardiac MRI. His research group focusses on developing new strategies to recharge the failing heart. His research includes fundamental studies to uncover the root cause of myocardial energy deficiency in heart failure as well as clinical trials testing new strategies to restore cardiac energy in this condition. He also employs advanced MRI techniques to study mitochondrial metabolism and cardiac function during exercise.

Dr Pavlovic graduated from the University of Huddersfield in 2001 and then did his PhD at University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof Raymond Dwek. On completion of his PhD in 2005, he moved to King’s College (London) and took up a post of a British Heart Foundation (BHF) research fellow in the Cardiac physiology laboratory headed by Prof. Michael Shattock. Dr Pavlovic has set up his research group in 2015 at the University of Birmingham where he is an Associate Professor. Dr Pavlovic has recently been appointed Editor in Chief of ISHR’s new open access journal JMCC PLUS.

Diana S Nascimento is an investigator at Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S) and an assistant researcher and professor at Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas de Abel Salazar (ICBAS), University of Porto. The main goal of DS Nascimento research is the development of more efficient bioengineered therapies for cardiovascular disorders, with special emphasis on driving cardiac regeneration and/or inhibiting the formation of fibrosis. In the past years, her lab has done significant contributions, namely on: 1) therapies to improve heart repair; 2) advancing the knowledge on cardiac regeneration and cardiogenesis; 3) extracellular matrix aging and remodelling after injury; 4) new approaches to analyse the cardiac injury response.

The work of Diego De Stefani has been always focused on mitochondria, in particular on ion transporters located at this organelle. At the beginning of his career, he contributed to the identification and characterization of the first described macromolecular complex located at the interface between ER and mitochondria (IP3R/GRP75/VDAC). His best recognized contribution up to now is the molecular identification of the Mitochondrial Calcium Uniporter (MCU). This work represented a genuine turning point in the field of calcium signaling, leading to the explosion of the field. In addition, he identified other accessory components of the MCU complex, e.g. MCUb, MICU2 and MICU3. More recently, he identified the essential components of a mitochondrial potassium channel, the so called mitoKATP.

Dr Dunja Aksentijevic, Reader (Associate Professor) in Cardiovascular Physiology and Metabolism. Dunja graduated from the University of Hull in 2004 with a BSc in Biomedical Science as the recipient of the Faculty of Science Academic Scholarship. She was awarded the University of Hull Frederick Atkinson Prize Scholarship and NHS Renal Research Fund Fellowship for her doctoral studies to examine myocardial insulin resistance in chronic kidney disease. In 2008, Dunja joined the University of Oxford and in 2013, she moved to King’s College London, as senior research fellow. In 2017 Dunja was appointed Lecturer in Physiology at Queen Mary University of London. In 2020, she joined William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London as the British Heart Foundation Accelerator Award Fellow. In 2021 she was awarded the Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship. Her research aims to determine how metabolic remodelling contributes to the pathophysiology of heart failure and from this develop novel therapies targeting metabolism. To investigate these research areas, she developed techniques which integrate physiology with NMR spectroscopy (23Na, 31P, 13C, 1H) that enable assessment of cardiac metabolism in situ. Work in her laboratory is funded by Diabetes UK, British Heart Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Bart’s Charity and industrial partners.

Prof. Eldad Tzahor received a BSc in biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in molecular biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot). After postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), he joined the staff of the Weizmann Institute in 2003. Prof. Tzahor studies novel mechanisms for cardiac regeneration following injury in mammals, a major challenge in current biomedical research. The lab develops novel approaches in cardiac biology to stimulate heart regeneration and repair. He is the recipient of a number of prestigious grants and awards, including two European Research Council (ERC) grants and the Levinson Prize in Biology. In addition, Prof. Tzahor is the Scientific Founder of two newly formed startup companies in the field of Cultivated Meat and Cardiac Repair.

Enno Klussmann studied Genetics at Queen Mary College, University of London, UK (1988) and Biology at the Philipps University Marburg, Germany (1992). He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat) from the Philipps University (1996) and his habilitation in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the Charité University Medicine Berlin, Germany (2005). From the Charité, he moved to the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut of Molecular Pharmacology (FMP), Berlin. In 2010, he moved to the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), Berlin, where he is currently leader of the Anchored Signalling group.

Eva van Rooij attended University Hospital Maastricht in the Netherlands where she received a Ph.D. at the department of Cardiology. She then went on to complete postdoctoral training in Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in the lab of Dr. Eric Olson where she served as lead scientist in the studies that linked microRNAs to cardiovascular disease. In her current work she combines high-end sequencing technologies, stem cells, mouse genetics, animal models of heart disease, and molecular biology to identify the important pathways for cardiac remodeling and repair and explore ways to enhance cardiac efficacy of new drugs.

Fatemeh obtained her bachelor and Master’s degree from University of Tehran, Iran, as a cellular and molecular biologist, where she learned and implemented different bioinformatics techniques within different Projects. Then she moved to Germany for her PhD in Oct 2018 in Soni Pullamsetti’s lab in Max Planck institute for Heart and Lung research. During her PhD she worked on several multidisciplinary projects on right ventricle hypertrophy mechanisms and other cardiovascular dysfunction, in particular those associated with Pulmonary Hypertension. Her focus was in various biological data generation and analysis approaches, such as single-cell multiomics (RNA expression and ATAC sequencing) from human tissues and different animal models of PAH. She is currently in the last phase of her Ph.D. research at Max Planck Institute for heart and lung research.

Florian Weinberger is a group leader at the Department of Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology. He graduated from Hamburg Medical School and received his training at the Charité, Berlin, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on cardiac regeneration. He is particularly interested in i) the development and translation of stem cell-based therapeutics, ii) the application of genetically engineered cardiomyocytes to study and improve cell transplantation and iii) the application of human tissue models to study cardiac physiology and disease in a dish.

Frank Lezoualc’h received his PhD in molecular endocrinology from the University Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich. He was appointed Director of Research at Inserm, University Paris-Sud in 2005 and became the head of the laboratory “Signaling and Pathophysiology of Heart Failure and Aging” at Inserm, Toulouse University in 2010. His is studying intracellular signalosomes activated by acute or chronic cardiac stress (ischemia, adrenergic overdrive, metabolic alteration) that promote pathological cardiac remodeling. His research aims to identify relevant targets for the treatment of heart failure and aging. His research programs led to the characterization of novel potential therapeutic targets (e.g EPAC, Carabin) and drug candidates (EPAC pharmacological inhibitors).

I am a MD/PhD cardiologist-scientist whose research focuses on molecular mechanisms of remodeling in the disease-stressed myocardium. I am leading a research group focused on molecular mechanisms of heart failure and cardiometabolic disease. My background is in medicine, experimental cardiology and cellular/molecular biology, with specific training and expertise in murine models of cardiovascular disease and preclinical assessment of cardiovascular function. My research interests include molecular mechanisms of cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure (HFpEF and HFrEF). My group focuses on defining, at the cellular and molecular level, how alterations in metabolism & metabolic signaling, posttranslational modifications and protein quality control in cardiomyocytes modulate cardiac function and promote pathological cardiac remodeling and heart failure.

Dr. Gary D. Lopaschuk received his BSc (Pharmacy, 1978), MSc (1980), and PhD (1983) from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. This was followed by a post-doctoral training at the Hershey Medical School of Penn State University. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Dr. Lopaschuk is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has served as Scientific Director of the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, and has previously served in a number of capacities with the Heart Stroke Foundation of Canada, including as Chair of the Scientific Review Committee and the Vice-Chair of the Research Planning and Priorities Committee. He is also the President of the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences NAS, and was recently the President of the International Society of Heart Research NAS. He serves on 16 journal editorial boards, including Circulation Research, Journal of Clinical Investigation, American Journal of Physiology, Cardiovascular Research, and Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. He is also the President and CEO of a biotechnology company (Metabolic Modulators Research Ltd.), that is developing novel drugs to treat heart disease that optimize energy metabolism in the heart. His research has resulted in the publication of over 450 research articles, and he has been recognized by awards such as the Canadian Cardiovascular Research Achievement Award, the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences Research Achievement Award, and the University of Alberta University Cup.

Dr Gavin Richardson, Ph. D is a Senior Lecturer and lead of the Vascular Medicine and Biology Theme, Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University. He obtained his PhD in Stem Cell Biology in Newcastle in 2004 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University studying skin dermal stem cells and skin ageing. During his career, Gavin has worked in institutions including Columbia and Harvard Universities as a visiting Fellow. His research aims to understand how senescence contributes to the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease with a focus on senescence-associated inflammation and maladaptive myocardial remodelling. The goal of Dr Richardson’s current work is to characterise the cardiac senescence signature to identify novel biomarkers and develop new therapies, targeting senescence, to improve cardiovascular health.

Dr. Vilahur is a Group Leader at the IR-HSCSP, Barcelona (Spain). She has published 177 articles in Pubmed (H-index=44) and is principal investigator of multiple research projects (National and European projects either funded by public agencies or industry) in the field of ischemic heart disease. Her work has been awarded several times and has received the L’Oreal-UNESCO foundation-for Women in Science Award (2012) and the Outstanding Achievement Award from the European Society of Cardiology (2019). As per positions of trust, she is the Past-Chair of the Working Group on Thrombosis of the European Society of Cardiology (2022-2024), the President-Elect of the European Society for Clinical Investigation (2023-2027), and Board Member of the National Funding Agency from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. She is co-author of 4 patents in cardioprotection (2014, 2016, 2018 and 2019) and co-founder of 3 Spin-Offs (2014, 2017, and 2021).

Academic Education

• 2003: Habilitation in Physiology, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany
• 1991 - 1994: PhD-Thesis, Institute for Molecular Biology and Cancer Research, Faculty of Medicine, Philipp-University, Marburg, Germany
• 1990: Diploma in Biology
• 1986 - 1990: Study of Biology, University of Cologne, Germany
• 1984 - 1986: Study of Biology, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany

Professional and Academic Career

• Since 2007: Apl. Professor, Institute of Physiology, JLU, Giessen, Germany
• 2003 - 2007: Research Associate, Institute of Physiology, JLU, Giessen, Germany
• 1995 - 2003: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute of Physiology, JLU, Giessen, Germany
• 1994 - 1995: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Institute for Molecular Biology and Cancer Research, Faculty of Medicine, Philipp-University, Marburg, Germany

Giancarlo Forte is the Head of the Center for Translational Medicine (CTM) of the International Clinical Research Center, an Institute of excellence founded by European Union within St. Anne’s University Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic (FNUSA-ICRC). He also holds a Senior Lecturer position at the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine and Sciences, King’s College London, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the cell-specific response to pathological extracellular matrix (ECM) remodelling, with special attention to the defects in the regulation of mechanosensitive intracellular pathways as determinants of diseases like cardiovascular diseases and cancer. His group adopts an interdisciplinary approach based on iPSCs, 3D disease models, imaging and molecular biology and contributed to identify the impact of negative ECM remodelling on mechanosensitive DNA transcription and RNA metabolism in the failing heart.

Henrique Girao (HG) is Principal Investigator at the Faculty of Medicine of University of Coimbra, where he is Deputy Director for Research, Director of the Coimbra Institute for Clinical and Biomedical Research, Co-chair of the Cardiovascular Area and Director of the Health Communication Lab. HG also coordinates the PhD program in Health Sciences and the Master in Biomedical Research. HG published > 100 papers, including Circ Res, EMBO Rep, Nature Reviews Cardiology, Cardiovasc Res, Science Adv, Life Sci Alliance, JAAC, FASEB J, J Cell Sci, Trends Cell Biol, Trends Mol Med, Autophagy, Molec Cell Proteomics, and J Extracel Vesicles. HG is specialized in cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the regulation of lysosomal protein degradation and intercellular communication and how their disturbance contribute to cardiovascular disorders.

Hiran is a research associate with Prof Thomas Krieg (University of Cambridge). After studying Pharmacy (University of Nottingham), he pursued a PhD in mitochondrial biochemistry supervised by Prof Mike Murphy (University of Cambridge). Hiran is exploring mitochondrial dysfunction in myocardial infarction and aiming to develop novel therapeutics.

• 2018 to Present: Independent group leader, Comprehensive Heart Failure Center Würzburg, Germany.

  Research focus: Metabolic remodelling in heart failure.

• 2010 to 2018: Research position in the Department of Cellular Biochemistry, University of Göttingen, Germany.

  Research focus: Structural changes in mitochondrial membrane protein complexes in cardiolipin deficiency.

• 2007 - 2010: Joint post-doc positions at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, Glasgow, UK (Dr. K. Vousden) and at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), USA (Dr. G. Evan).

  Research focus: Transcriptional programs driving cancer progression.

• 2007 Doctorate from the Institute for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dr. N. Pfanner, Freiburg, Germany.

  Research focus: Mitochondrial protein transport

Jean-Pierre Benitah, Director of Research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research is Head of Calcium Signaling and Cardiovascular Pathophysiology Team, University Paris-Saclay. Internationally recognized expert of cardiac ion channel and calcium signaling, author of 84 peer reviewed publications cited >4000 times, his main research focus on the regulatory mechanisms of cardiac ion channel functional expression involved in arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, notably during heart failure. Some of his key findings include: 1/ regional down regulation of Ito in both human and animal cardiac hypertrophy; 2/ cardiac mineralocorticoid receptor regulation of Ca2+ channels, participating to arrhythmia and treatment-resistant hypertension; 3/ Orai1 Ca2+ channel inhibition protection of the heart from maladaptive hypertrophy.

Jen Davis is an associate professor in the Departments of Lab Medicine and Pathology as well as Bioengineering at the University of Washington, where she directs the Center for Cardiovascular Biology and serves as an associate director for the Institute of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. Jen received her doctorate in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Michigan and performed her post-doctoral training at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She was a recipient of the Louis N. & Arnold M. Katz Basic Cardiovascular Science Research Award from the American Heart Association. Her research program seeks to identify the basic physiologic tenets of fibroblast biology, their mechanistic underpinnings, and how their homeostatic behaviors turn maladaptive and drive fibrosis and inflammation, tissue stiffening, and structural remodeling. This research has been continually supported by the National Institute of Health and American Heart Association. It has also led to more than 50 publications in top tier journals including Cell, Cell Stem Cell, and Circulation.

During my thesis, I was trained as a cellular electrophysiologist studying the modulation of voltage gated calcium channels in cardiomyocytes and heterologuous systems. I then held a post-doctoral position in the UK at University College London where I joined in 2002 the Pr Dolphin's group at the Pharmacology department, to study the G protein modulation of neuronal calcium channels. Back to France in 2005, I joined Rodolphe Fischmeister's group in Paris to study the role of phosphodiesterases in heart. In 2008, took up a lectureship position at the faculty of Pharmacy of the Paris Sud now Paris-Saclay university and became full professor in 2019, exploring the remodelling of cyclic nucleotides pathways occuring in heart failure to propose new therapeutic strategies.

John studied Biochemistry at New College, Oxford, and then a PhD on cAMP signalling and the mammalian circadian pacemaker at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge with Michael Hastings. As a post-doc, he studied circadian rhythms in plants and algae with Andrew Millar (Edinburgh) and then human cells then at the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge. John was awarded a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship in 2011, and in 2013 was recruited to become a group leader in the LMB's Cell Biology Division. The O’Neill group is interested in the fundamental mechanisms that sustain circadian rhythms in eukaryotic cells, and how this daily timekeeping bestows an adaptive advantage upon specific mammalian cellular functions.

Jolanda van der Velden is chair of the Department for Physiology at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, and director of the Amsterdam Cardiovascular Sciences Institute. The main research focus of the van der Velden team is inherited cardiomyopathies, and experiments are performed from bench to the clinic. Expertise includes functional studies at single cardiac muscle cell and multicellular level, and mitochondrial studies in patient samples obtained during cardiac surgery and stem cell-derived heart models. Studies in human are complemented with studies in a cardiomyopathy mouse model. The current research projects aim to define the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in onset of cardiac disease, metabolic stress (obesity) as secondary disease hit, and protein homeostasis with a focus on the microtubular network.

My name is Jose L. Sanchez-Alonso. I am an electrophysiologist with a PhD in Neuroscience and ten years of experience in Cardiovascular Research as a Research Associate. I have been involved in several projects studying nanoscale signalling domains in cardiomyocytes. My research has comprehensively characterized both human and rat myocytes in health and disease. I have become an expert in the application of Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy to study different cell types, focusing in characterize nanodomains. Using this technique, I study cell membrane surfaces by locating functional channels or characterizing their mechanical properties. My current interest is studying the interaction between sympathetic neurons and cardiomyocytes by characterizing in vitro co-cultures.

Kjetil Wessel Andressen received his PhD in 2008 and is now an Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oslo, Norway, leading the research group “Compartmentation of cardiac signaling”. Andressen is a former Chair of Pharmacology in the Norwegian Society of Pharmacology and Toxicology. He studies G protein coupled receptors and Natriuretic Peptide receptors and the effect of compartmentation of cGMP and cAMP in cardiomyocytes through development of novel targeted FRET-based biosensors with high affinity for cGMP. His research group use mouse and rat models of HFpEF to investigate the role of cGMP in regulating passive tension and diastolic filling. Based on this work, his group has proposed a role for CNP in the treatment of HFpEF.

De Windt has been at the forefront of shaping the concept that calcineurin and its downstream transcription factor Nuclear Factor of Activated T-cells (NFAT) are vital for pathological heart disease. His work demonstrated that transcriptional processes are crucial for pressure overload and post-infarction-induced cardiac remodelling. He discovered that one subclass of NFAT target genes includes stress-induced microRNAs and his laboratory dedicated to studying RNA biology of the heart. The De Windt laboratory was the first to establish the essential role of correct microRNA biogenesis for cardiac homeostasis and they discovered the microRNA genes miR-199b, miR-214 and miR-25 and their pathogenic mechanism of action in the myocardium (Circulation, 2008, Nat. Cell. Biol, 2010, Nat. Cell. Biol, 2013; Cell Metabolism, 2013, Nat. Commun, 2021). His research interests have expanded to deciphering the mechanistic involvement of long non-coding RNAs and circular RNAs that they identified through whole genome-, and (single-cell) RNA sequencing (Genomics, 2021, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 2021). The De Windt laboratory was the first in the field in the Netherlands to successfully make use of antagomirs that provoke long-lasting silencing of an endogenous microRNA gene (Nat. Cell. Biol, 2010). This sparked the founding of spin-off companies such as Mirabilis Therapeutics BV and Summa Biotech BV to further develop these findings.

Lino Silva Ferreira holds a Ph.D. in Biotechnology from the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He did postdoctoral work at INEB (Portugal) and MIT (USA) in the areas of stem cells and nanotechnologies. He established his research group in 2008 at the University of Coimbra. Since then is the director of the Advanced Therapies research group, CNC coordinator of the MIT-Portugal Program and the founder of the biotech companies Matera and Curemat. Since 2018, he is the associate editor of Biomaterials Science Journal (RSC) journal. In 2012, he was awarded with a prestigious European Research Council starting grant and in 2016 a prestigious ERA Chair position in the area of Ageing at the University of Coimbra. Since 2020, he is the coordinator of the Colab4Ageing, a collaborative laboratory that integrates companies, health and social providers, in the area of ageing. His group has interest in the development of ageing models and in the creation of new therapeutic approaches to fight ageing, in particular cardiovascular ageing.

Llewelyn is a Professor in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences at KU Leuven Belgium. His laboratory identifies molecular and physiological mechanisms involved in cardiac maturation, disease and ageing. His physiological studies focus on the role of Ca2+ microdomains and Ca2+ signals generated via InsP3Rs in the control of arrhythmic activity and excitation contraction coupling in cardiac pathology. Using omics approaches, including single cell analysis, he investigates cellular heterogeneity, heterocellular interactions and the role of the epigenome (DNA and histone methylation) in cardiomyocyte proliferation, hypertrophy and ageing. He employs genetically modified mouse models for mechanistic studies and large animal preclinical models, including pig and sheep, together with patient samples to increase the translational potential of his research.

Previously Research Director of the FNRS, Prof. Luc Bertrand is currently Full Professor in Biochemistry and Deputy Dean of the faculty of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the UCLouvain University (Brussels, Belgium). He is group leader in the pole of Cardiovascular Research of the IREC Institute and fellow of the Walloon Excellence Research Institute. His research group aims to understand the relationship between metabolism and cardiac dysfunction in heart failure. He is particularly interested in the impact of post-translational modifications including O-GlcNAcylation and acetylation. He is board member of international scientific organizations (European section of the International Society for Heart Research, Working group of myocardial function of the European Society of cardiology) and Consulting Editor of the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

Luca Scorrano’s work addresses the central question of form-function relationship at the molecular level in mitochondria. His work changed classical tenets in the fields of apoptosis and mitochondrial pathophysiology. During his postdoc with Stan Korsmeyer, he discovered the cristae remodeling pathway, launching the field of mitochondrial dynamics. Our lab elucidated the molecular mechanisms of cristae shape and remodeling and identified the first molecular tether between ER and mitochondria (propelling the field of membrane contact sites). We integrate unbiased approaches, biochemistry, and genetics to elucidate how mitochondrial shape influences complex cellular processes, from angiogenesis to heart development and damage, from adipocyte differentiation to cancer. Luca is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, an EMBO and Academia Europaea Member. He is most proud of the 50 mentored PhD students and postdocs who went on to successful careers in industry and academia.

Manuela Zaccolo received her MD-PhD in 1988 from the University of Torino, Italy. She then moved to the LMB in Cambridge, UK, as a post-doctoral fellow, where she worked on the development of protein engineering and in vitro evolution approaches. She returned to Italy as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Padova and, supported by a Telethon career award, she established her independent group at the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine (VIMM) in Padova in 2000. In 2007 she joined the University of Glasgow as a reader and since 2012 she is Professor of Cell Biology in the Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford. She is deputy head of department and director of the Burdon Sanderson Cardiac Science Centre. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and of the Academia Europea.

Over the past two decades, her research has primarily been directed to unravelling the intricate dynamics of cyclic nucleotide signalling, with a particular focus on the cardiac myocyte. She has made significant contributions to the field by developing the first genetically encoded fluorescent probes for cAMP detection in living cells. This breakthrough provided direct evidence of nanodomain cAMP signalling and shed light on the crucial role of phosphodiesterases in cAMP compartmentalization. Her work has contributed to our understanding of how second messengers achieve hormonal specificity through subcellular compartmentalization and nanodomain signalling. This novel paradigm has changed the way we study intracellular signalling. It has provided a new perspective on how signalling is involved in disease and on how it can be targeted for therapeutic purposes.

In recent years, her research efforts have been focused on constructing a comprehensive map of cAMP nanodomains in cardiac myocytes using real-time imaging and targeted FRET reporters (Surdo et al., Nature Communications 2017, Anton et al., Cell 2022), combined with proteomics approaches (Subramaniam et al., Circulation Research 2023). The aim is to uncover novel, non-obvious cAMP- dependent signalling nodes that could potentially reveal promising therapeutic targets for the treatment of cardiac diseases with subcellular precision.

Mariana Branco holds a MSc in Biological Engineering from IST, a PhD in Bioengineering from IST, and is currently working as an assistant researcher in the collaborative laboratory Accelbio. Mariana has now 7 years of experience in working with human pluripotent stem cells in the cardiac field. She has been dedicated to bring together bioengineering and developmental biology concepts to achieve innovative and cutting-edge in vivo inspired platforms that recreate heart organogenesis in vitro. She published 4 peer-reviewed papers and 2 book chapters and she is leading as PI the FCT funded project “Nervous Heart”. Currently she is focused on translating cardiac organoid models for developmental cardiotoxicity applications and for modelling neurodevelopmental disorders that present identified heart function defects.

I graduated in Veterinary Medicine at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and did my doctoral thesis at Hospital Vall d'Hebron (Barcelona) on the mechanisms of cardiomyocyte death during ischemia-reperfusion injury, under the supervision of Prof. David Garcia-Dorado. I spent a few months in the laboratory of Prof. Michael Piper in Düsseldorf where I learned some experimental models that were fundamental for my line of research. I have published >130 articles, focused on the pathophysiology of ischemia-reperfusion (IR), with particular interest in calcium homeostasis, connexin43 and cell-to-cell interaction, and the role of mitochondria in the aging of cardiomyocytes and the transtion towards failing cells. My H index is 42.

Mathias Gautel received his MD from Heidelberg University in 1991, and moved to EMBL Heidelberg as post-doctoral fellow, where he worked on titin for his habilitation in Biochemistry until 1998. After a Heisenberg fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute Dortmund, he joined King’s College London in 2002. He is Head of the School of Basic and Medical Biosciences and holds the British Heart Foundation Chair of Molecular Cardiology. He was awarded the International Society for Heart Research Outstanding Investigator Award in 2009. His work is centred on sarcomeric structure and mechanosignalling using structural, biophysical and cellular approaches. His team identified and characterised many novel sarcomeric components and mechanisms like cardiac myosin-binding protein-C, the giant protein obscurin, the regulatory mechanism of sarcomeric alpha-actinin. Recent interests are the pathomechanisms of missense mutations and the role of proteostasis in titin-linked hereditary myopathies.

Matteo Mangoni’s research activity is focused on the role of ion channels, receptors and intracellular signaling mechanism involved in the genesis and autonomic regulation of heart automaticity. In the past, he contributed to describe the roles of L-type Ca v 1.3, T-type Ca v 3.1 and G-protein activated K + (GIRK4) channels in pacemaking, as well as the role of f-(HCN4) channels in setting the heart rate and atrioventricular conduction. His team develops also long-term research plan to identify new molecular targets amenable to development of strategies for improving the heart rate in bradyarrhythmias. In this context, he recently proposed that cardiac GIRK4 channels constitute new, worth to explore, molecular target to improve heart rate and in sinoatrial node dysfunction and atrioventricular block.

Mauro Giacca is Head of the School of Cardiovascular Medicine & Sciences at King’s College London. Until 2019, he has served as the Director-General of ICGEB, a United Nations organization in Trieste, Italy. He has obtained his Degree in Medicine from the University of Trieste, Italy and his PhD in Virology from the University of Genoa, Italy. He is considered an expert in the generation of viral vectors for cardiovascular applications and the development of novel biologics for cardiac repair and regeneration. Prof Giacca is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the United Kingdom and serves as the President of the International Society for Heart Research - European Section.

Miguel Mano is Group Leader at Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra and Senior Lecturer at the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence, King’s College London, United Kingdom. His research is focused on the identification and molecular characterization of novel cellular factors relevant to cardiac regeneration and repair, with a particular emphasis on cardiac fibrosis, and the translation of this knowledge into effective RNA-based therapeutic strategies. Miguel Mano is an expert in the development and application of high-throughput and high-content screening technologies using small compounds and genome-wide siRNA, miRNA and CRISPR libraries.

Miguel Torres is a Senior scientists at the Spanish National Center for cardiovascular Research. He previously trained at The Spanish CSIC and the German Max-Plank Society. Miguel Torees’ research group has a strong focus on understanding organ development and regeneration. Dr Torres group characterized the role of homeobox genes and signaling pathways in establishing positional information along the limb proximo-distal axis during development and regeneration. The group has also devised new clonal analysis strategies and live imaging tools that allowed defining new lineage relationships and tissue dynamics in limb and cardiovascular development. The group also demonstrated the conservation of cell death pathways in metazoan evolution and contributed to understanding cell competition in mammalian tissue homeostasis and regeneration.

Milena Bellin is Full Professor of Genetics and Group Leader at the Dept. of Biology and Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Padua (Italy), and Principal Investigator at the Dept. of Anatomy and Embryology, Leiden University Medical Center (The Netherlands). She pioneered the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) to study inherited cardiac diseases. Her research ranges from developing three-dimensional multicellular cardiac organoids to the development of hiPSC-based platforms for drug-screening and safety pharmacology. During her career, she has been granted with a Marie Curie fellowship (2012), FEBS Anniversary Prize for outstanding achievements in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2016), and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2020). She is part of the Institute for human Organ and Disease Model technologies.

Mélanie Paillard is an Inserm Associate Researcher in the IRIS (Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury Syndromes) team at CarMeN laboratory in Lyon (France). Her main research focus consists in pursuing a translational research for the development of new protective strategies targeting mitochondria during cardiometabolic diseases (diabetic cardiomyopathy, HFpEF, myocardial infarction & stroke). She graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon in 2008 and obtained her PhD in Physiology in 2012 from the University Claude Bernard Lyon1. She joined the MitoCare center of Pr Gyorgy Hajnoczky in 2013 (Philadelphia, USA) for her post-doctoral training on the physio-pathological role of MICU1, a key regulator of the mitochondrial uniporter for which she received the Young Bioenergeticist Award in 2017.

Nadia Mercader Huber studied Biology at ETH (Switzerland) and in 2003 was awarded her PhD in Molecular Biology by the Universidad Autónoma (Spain). After her PhD, she moved to the EMBL (Germany), as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2007, she joined the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares CNIC (Spain) as a Junior group leader. Since August 2015, Nadia Mercader holds a professorship at the Institute of Anatomy, University of Bern (Switzerland) and is visiting professor at CNIC. Her group studies the mechanisms of cardiac development as well as heart regeneration and fibrosis regression in the zebrafish.

Niels Voigt is Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute of Pharmacology at the Georg-August University Göttingen. He graduated and received his MD from the University of Dresden in 2007. He worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the Institute of Pharmacology in Dresden, at the Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University and at the Institute of Pharmacology at the Duisburg-Essen University. In 2013, he obtained the specialization in Pharmacology and Toxicology. He has received numerous research awards e.g. the Oskar-Lapp-Research Award (2015) from the German Cardiac Society and the Best of Basic Science Abstracts Award from the American Heart Association (2013). His field of interest is the regulation of ion channels and calcium signaling in the normal and diseased heart.

Paul Riley is a British Heart Foundation Professor of Regenerative Medicine based at the University of Oxford. He is also Director of the BHF Oxbridge Centre for Regenerative Medicine and inaugural Director of the Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine which came online in May 2022. He was formerly Professor of Molecular Cardiology at the UCL-Institute of Child Health, London, where he was a principal investigator within the Molecular Medicine Unit for 12 years. Prior to this, he obtained his PhD at UCL and completed post-doctoral fellowships in Toronto and Oxford. In 2008, Professor Riley was awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award by the European Society of Cardiology, in recognition of his team’s discovery that activated epicardial cells can regenerate the adult mammalian heart, and in 2014 he was elected a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. His research interests span across multiple aspects of cardiovascular development and how to restore embryonic potential in the injured/diseased adult heart to facilitate optimal repair and regeneration.

Assistant Professor at Faculty of Medicine University of Porto.

Member of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health (I3S).

EX- President of the Portuguese Society for the Study of Obesity

Petra Kleinbongard studied Biology and received her PhD from Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Currently, she is Professor in and Deputy Managing Director of the Institute of Pathophysiology at University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). Her research is focused on cardioprotection by ischemic and pharmacological conditioning, aimed at better understanding the underlying signal transduction of conditioning, improving existing patient-specific applications to protect the heart and establishing novel therapies. Dr. Kleinbongard is addressing this aim by combining large animal models with bioassays on cardiomyocyte and vascular function, as well as protein biochemical methods. She is active in the editorial board of Basic Research in Cardiology and the International Journal of Cardiology and serves as Associate Editor for AJP-Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

Philip Eaton gained a BSc in Biochemistry from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1989 before completing his PhD studies at the University of Sussex. After post-doctoral work at the Institute of Psychiatry, he joined the Department of Cardiovascular Research at the Rayne Institute, St Thomas’ Hospital in 1995. He remained there for nearly 24 years within the School of Cardiovascular Medicine & Sciences at King’s College London. In 2019, he moved to the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London where he heads a group studying the molecular basis of redox sensing and signalling in the cardiovascular system.

Prof. Péter Ferdinandy is recognized as Highly Cited Researcher in 2014, 2017, 2020, 2021, and 2022. He published more than 300 papers, 5 patent families. His Hirsh index is 72. He received an MD in 1991, a PhD in 1995 at the University of Szeged, Hungary. He had a postdoctoral training at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada from 1997-99. He became a registered clinical pharmacologist in 1999. He received MBA in finance and quality management in 2004 from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He founded Pharmahungary Group, a group of R&D companies (www.pharmahungary.com) that have been involved in more than 250 drug/medical device development projects since their foundation in the early 2000s. He was the president of the International Society for Heart Research, European Section, and the chair of the Working Group of Cellular Biology of the Heart of the Eureopen Society for Cardiology. Currently he is the vice-rector for science and innovations and the director of the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy, at Semmelweis University, Budapest (www.semmelweis.hu). He is the president of the Hungarian Society of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology (www.huphar.org), and serves as Editor in Chief of British Journal of Pharmacology.

Since 2019 Reinier Boon is a professor at the Amsterdam UMC and at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Reinier received his PhD degree with honors in 2008 from the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. After his post-doc project in the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration in Frankfurt, Germany, Dr. Boon continued there as a junior group leader. He received multiple awards for his work on the role of small and long non-coding RNAs in aging of the cardiovascular system, for instance the Outstanding Achievement Award of the European Society of Cardiology in 2019. Dr. Boon’s research is mainly funded by the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), the European Research Council (Consolidator grant), the Dutch Heart Foundation (DHF) and the European Union (Horizon 2020). Current research is focused on non-coding RNA and aging of the cardiovascular system, in particular in the context of heart failure.

Riikka Kivelä’s research is focused on the endothelial cells and their interactions with cardiomyocytes in cardiometabolic and heart disease. During her postdoc with Prof. Kari Alitalo, she discovered how angiogenesis regulates cardiomyocyte growth and protects the heart from ischemic insult. Her lab demonstrated that VEGFR and ERBB signaling pathways mediate the endothelial cell – cardiomyocyte crosstalk in response to angiogenic stimuli. They also recently demonstrated how aging and obesity adversely remodel cardiac endothelial transcriptome and that exercise training provided opposite, protective effects. Riikka Kivelä started her own lab at the University of Helsinki, Finland in 2016 and in 2021 she was appointed as an Associate Professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dr. Tian is professor and director of the interdisciplinary Mitochondria & Metabolism Center at University of Washington. Her work is recognized in three inter-related areas: bioenergetics, metabolism, and mitochondrial biology. Her research on metabolic reprogramming in heart failure has contributed to paradigm-shifting view of cardiac metabolism and has led to clinical trials of mitochondria-targeted therapy. She received numerous awards and honors including Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Heart Association Basic Science Council, Research Achievement Award of the International Society for Heart Research, and 2021 George E. Brown Memorial Lecturer of the American Heart Association. She is currently the Editor in Chief for the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.

Rudolf de Boer is Chair and Professor of Cardiology at the Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His clinical and research interests include heart failure, with a specialty in cardiogenetics, cardio-oncology, obesity, diabetes, HFpEF and biomarkers. He has served as the president of the Heart Failure Working Group of the Dutch Society of Cardiology, been a board member of the Heart Failure Association (HFA), and currently is the President-Elect of the Dutch Cardiac Society. He has been an associate editor of the European Journal of Heart Failure and now is an associate editor of the European Heart Journal (section Heart Failure).

Serena Zacchigna obtained her degree in Medicine in 2000 from the University of Trieste and her PhD in Molecular Genetics in 2005 from the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. In 2006 she was awarded a Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship in Carmeliet Laboratory at VIB in Leuven (Belgium) to work on the neurovascular link.

In 2009 she returned to Trieste, where she established her own research group at ICGEB in 2015. Since 2019 she hss joined the University of Trieste as Associate Professor.

Her research interests focus on the crosstalk between multiple cell types in the heart. In particular, she is dissecting the mechanisms mediating the communication between endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes, with the ultimate goal of promoting effective neo-vascularization and regeneration.

She has published over 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals (h-index 44; source: SCOPUS).

Following my training as bioengineer in cell and gene technology and PhD in medical science at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and a Marie Curie fellowship in Italy, I landed at the Charité, Berlin, Germany in 2004. With the overarching goal to find patient-specific immunomodulatory therapies, my research is focused on inflammation and its bidirectional relationship with fibroblasts and the extracellular matrix with main emphasis on inflammatory cardiomyopathy, diabetic cardiomyopathy, and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.

Dr. Tamás Csont received his MD in 1996 and his PhD in 2000 from the University of Szeged in Szeged, Hungary. This was followed by a post-doctoral training at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is currently the director of the Department of Biochemistry at the Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical School of the University of Szeged. His research group focuses on investigation of the effect of various metabolic disorders including hyperlipidemia, diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease on cardiac function and the adaptive ability of the heart to ischemia/reperfusion injury. His research includes preclinical studies to examine potential cardioprotective molecules in various stress models.

Thomas studied Medicine at Hannover where he also completed his MD Thesis and trained for 3 years in Cardiology before starting his specialization in Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Hamburg, where he completed a postgraduate study of Molecular Biology in 1992. He served as Director of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Erlangen (1998-2002) and, since 2002, is Director of the Department of Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf. From 2011 to 2020, he served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research. He is member of the German Academy of Science Leopoldina (2008) and was President of the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR, 2019-2022). His research is funded internationally through grants from various public and private bodies, including an ERC AG. He published >330 papers (>20,000 citations, h-index 77) and >35 reviews or chapters in textbooks including the leading pharmacology textbooks in Germany and the Goodman & Gilman. His research focusses on molecular cardiology with a focus on adrenergic control of the heart, stem cells and tissue engineering, a technology he pioneered in 1994.

Timon Seeger is employing induce pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) based models in combination with genome editing to elucidate pathogenetic mechanisms leading from genotype to phenotype in familial cardiomyopathies. With his research group, he is predominantly working on hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathy (HCM and DCM) using iPSC lines from patients with specific mutations. While being a medical doctor and actively working in the Cardiology Department of the University-Hospital Heidelberg, he initially got trained in molecular based research in the Lab of Prof. Stefanie Dimmeler, Frankfurt, Germany. As a postdoc he then joined the group of Prof. Joseph Wu, Stanford, USA, working on iPSC-based disease modelling. Returning to Heidelberg, he set up a Cardio Stem Cell Unit to spread the technology of iPSC-based research while also pursuing his own research interest of identifying and understanding translationally relevant pathogenetic mechanisms in cardiomyopathies.

Dr. Andrés was appointed Assistant Professor at Tufts University (Boston, USA) in 1996. He returned to Spain in 1999 to establish his lab at the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia (CSIC), where he was Full Professor and Head of the Department of Pathology and Molecular and Cellular Therapy (2003-2009). In 2009, he moved to the Spanish National Cardiovascular Investigation Center (CNIC), where he has been Director of Basic Research Department since 2015. His lab investigates mechanisms underlying physiological aging and progeria and associated cardiovascular disease (CVD) with the goal of improving diagnosis and treatment. He received an Innovator Award (2012) and an Established Investigator Award (2014) from the Progeria Research Foundation, and is member of its Medical Research Committee since 2015.

Wolfgang Linke received a PhD from the University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and postdoctoral training at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA). He was a Research Assistant Professor at Institute of Physiology, University of Heidelberg (Germany), Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at University of Munster (Germany), and Professor for Cardiovascular Physiology at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). Currently he is the Chair of Physiology and Director of the Institute of Physiology II at University Medicine Munster and Guest Professor at University Medicine Gottingen (Germany). His scientific interests include basic and translational research on heart failure and cardiomyopathies, with a focus on cardiomyocyte function. He is a Fellow of the ISHR, the European Society of Cardiology, and Academician of the Gottingen Academy of Sciences.

Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann is Professor and Director of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University Medical Center Göttingen. His research interests include: (1) development and translation of stem cell-based tissue engineered therapeutics; (2) therapeutic genome editing; (3) human organoids for disease modelling and drug discovery; (4) inter-cellular and inter-organ cross-talk in organ damage and repair. Major organs/tissue of interest include heart muscle, skeletal muscle, nervous system, and connective tissue. Zimmermann is the initiator of the first-in-human BioVAT-HF-DZHK20 trial, which is testing tissue engineered heart repair with Engineered Human Myocardium (EHM) from induced pluripotent stem cells in patients with advanced heart failure. His track record includes >200 publications, 13 patents, and the founding of several spin-offs (e.g., Repairon, myriamed, MyriaMeat).

Yael Yaniv is the head of the Bioelectric and Bioenergetics Lab located in Biomedical Engineering in the Techion in Israel. Her lab research focuses on two main objectives: understanding the molecular mechanisms that control heart rate dynamics during healthy, diseases and aged condition and developing noninvasive tools to detect when the sinoatrial node function is falling.

Yoram Etzion is the head of the cardiac arrhythmia research laboratory and a member of the regenerative medicine and stem cell research center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He graduated the MD, PhD program of Ben-Gurion University and performed a residency in internal medicine and a post-doc in cardiovascular research in Washington University, St. Louis USA. Currently his main research interests focus on cardiac pacing and electrophysiology and on molecular mechanisms underlying cardiac arrhythmias. A unique methodology developed in Etzion's laboratory enables implantation of cardiac electrodes in small mammals for repeated electrophysiological testing in the freely moving state.

Zoltan Varga is a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapy of the Medical Faculty of Semmelweis University. He graduated in 2009 (M.D.), received his Ph.D degree in 2013. He did his postdoctoral training at the NIH from 2015- 2018. He is currently a leader of the Cardiometabolic Immunology Research Group of the Hungarian Center of Excellence in Molecular Medicine and the Momentum Cardio-oncology and Cardioimmunology Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research covers areas of molecular cardiology, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular immunology and pharmacology, and cardiotoxicity of immune checkpoint inhibitors, placing special emphasis on studying the role of microRNAs, and inflammatory interorgan interactions in these disease states.

Zoltán Papp M.D. Ph.D. is an experimental cardiologist and chairman of the Division of Clinical Physiology, Department of Cardiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Debrecen, Hungary. He became full professor in 2010, and currently he also serves as the the secretary of ISHR-ES and Vice-Dean for Scientific Affairs at the University of Debrecen. His main research interest relates to myocardial pathophysiology, cardiac contractility, cardiomyocyte physiology, ischemia-reperfusion injury,