Lothar A. Blatter, M.D., Dr Med.

Dr. Blatter is a professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Rush University Chicago. He received his MD degree and the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the University of Bern in Switzerland. He completed postdoctoral training in physiology and pharmacology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the University of Maryland. He held faculty positions at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, Loyola University Chicago and now at Rush University. He was recognized as an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association. He has authored over 150 research articles and book chapters. Since 1993 he has maintained an active, independent and extramurally funded (NIH, AHA and Leducq foundation) research program. His research focuses on mechanisms of excitation-contraction coupling and cellular calcium signaling in healthy and diseased hearts, using high-resolution imaging techniques, electrophysiological methods and molecular biology approaches.

Robert Gourdie, Ph.D.

Dr. Gourdie is the Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research (CHRMR) at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. His work includes basic mechanisms of cardiac bio-electricity and translational research on drugs targeting connexin function in heart disease and wound healing. Gourdie coined the term the perinexus to describe the specialized region of cell-to-cell interaction at the edge of gap junctions, identifying that it was niche for connexin hemichannels and voltage-gated sodium channels. More recently his lab showed that the beta subunits of sodium channels within the perinexus may be key players in the formation of ephaptic nanodomains contributing to cardiac conduction.

Gregory Hoeker, Ph.D.

Dr. Hoeker received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2014. He completed his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Steven Poelzing, Ph.D. and recently became a research assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. His work focuses on the role of ephaptic coupling in the dynamic regulation of excitability and conduction during cardiac ischemia.

Divya Kernik

Divya Kernik is currently a doctoral candidate advised by Dr. Colleen Clancy in the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Her thesis work is focused on computational modeling of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyoctyes, and using population-based approaches to analyze phenotypic variability in these cells. Prior to graduate school, she received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Math from Johns Hopkins University.

Soo Yeun Lee, Ph.D.

Dr. Lee is a scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. There, she investigates the biophysical mechanisms underlying how extracellular electric fields impact specific cell types and circuits in the brain through ephaptic coupling. Prior to joining the Allen Institute, Soo completed her postdoctoral studies with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University and Ph.D. with Ivan Soltesz at UC Irvine, and received her B.A degree at UC Berkeley. Her long-term research interests are in understanding how neural circuits can be modulated through molecular, optogenetic, and electrical methods to develop more effective therapies for brain disorders.

Read Montague, Ph.D.

Read Montague’s work focuses on computational neuroscience – the connection between physical mechanisms present in real neural tissue and the computational functions that these mechanisms embody. His early theoretical work focused on the hypothesis that dopaminergic systems encode a particular kind of computational process, a reward prediction error signal, similar to those used in areas of artificial intelligence like optimal control. In pursuit of testing these ideas in humans, Montague founded the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and pursued functional neuroimaging experiments analogous to those used in other model species. From 2005 to 2006, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he focused on game theory and its potential use as a probe of psychopathology. In 2006, he was the founding director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit at Baylor College of Medicine. In 2011, Montague moved to the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and the department of physics at Virginia Tech, received a Principal Research Fellowship from The Wellcome Trust, and became a principal at The Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL). At UCL, he also serves as adjunct faculty at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and participating faculty member of the University College London/Max Planck Institute Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing. He is actively engaged in translating computational neuroscience into the domain of mental health through work in computational psychiatry. His group has recently pioneered new approaches to sub-second neurotransmitter measurements in conscious humans. Over the past decade, he was a member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Neuroscience and Law with a particular interest in the mental states project(s). His laboratory uses theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to the problems of mental health and its derangement by disease and injury. Work in the laboratory is supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, The Kane Family Foundation, Autism Speaks, The MacArthur Foundation, The Dana Foundation, and The Wellcome Trust.

Arkady Pertsov, Ph.D.

Dr. Pertsov has been a professor of pharmacology at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY since 1990. He received his B.Sc and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1970. In 1975, he defended his doctoral thesis in biophysics from The Institute of Biophysics at the Russian Academy of Sciences. His research area is in excitable media, excitation propagation in the heart, and cardiac arrhythmias. Mostly known for his theoretical and experimental work on spiral and scroll waves, Dr. Pertsov was one of the pioneers who developed the ephaptic coupling hypothesis. In 1976, he suggested the involvement of ephaptic coupling in propagation of cardiac action potential and theoretically estimated its contribution.

Przemysław Radwański, Ph.D.

Dr. Radwański earned his PharmD from the University of Illinois (Chicago) and his PhD from the University of Utah. He completed his pharmacy residency training at the Intermountain Healthcare and postdoctoral training at the Ohio State University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University studying the mechanisms by which sodium channels contribute to arrhythmogenic defects in calcium cycling in the heart and developing novel anti‐arrhythmic therapies.

Rengasayee (Sai) Veeraraghavan, Ph.D.

Dr. Veeraraghavan is an engineer who is obsessed with imaging, and the propagation of electrical signals through the heart. His work combines these twin obsessions by applying cutting-edge imaging tools from a single molecule to uncover how structure and function at the nanoscale drive the entire heart’s physiology. Specifically, his laboratory investigates the mechanisms underlying atrial fibrillation and working to develop novel therapies against it.

Ning Wei, Ph.D.

Dr. Ning Wei is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University. She received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Minnesota in 2016. From 2016-2018, Dr. Wei was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University in the Mathematics Department. Her research is on mathematical modeling of cardiac electrophysiology, renal physiology and circadian clock in the kidney. The focus of cardiac electrophysiology is to explore the impact of ephaptic coupling in the diseased heart.