Åsa Gustafsson is a Professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Director of the Division of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Diseases. Dr. Gustafsson is interested in understanding the molecular pathways that regulate the life and death of cardiac myocytes. Activation of cell death pathways is a common occurrence in cardiovascular disease and contributes to the development of heart failure. Her research is focused on elucidating pathways involved in regulating mitochondrial function and degradation in myocardial cells. She is also interested in alternative mechanisms of mitochondrial quality control in cells. Defects in these pathways lead to the accumulation of aberrant mitochondria and loss of cardiac myocytes. Her lab utilizes molecular and genetic approaches to identify and perturb specific regulators of mitochondrial function and autophagy in mice and cells. Dr. Gustafsson joined the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in October 2009. Prior to coming to UCSD, she was an Assistant Professor at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the Department of Pharmacology at UCSD in 2001. Her postdoctoral training was done at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla with Dr. Roberta Gottlieb. For her contributions to cardiovascular research, she was awarded the ISHR Outstanding Investigator Award in 2014. She is also an elected Fellow of the American Heart Association and a Fellow of the International Society for Heart Research. She is the President-Elect of the International Society for Heart Research.

Yoshihiko Saito, a physician-scientist in the cardiovascular field, graduated from Nara Medical University in 1981 and started his scientific career in 1985 at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine. He got his thesis on natriuretic peptides' clinical and pathological significance in 1990. He moved to the National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute to study protein purification and molecular biology. He was appointed to Nara Medical University as a professor of the First Department of Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Medicine, in 2002. He is currently CEO of Nara Prefecture Seiwa Medical Center from 2022. During the last 35 years, he has studied the three primary research targets: the diagnostic and therapeutic application of natriuretic peptides in heart failure, the molecular mechanism of cardiorenal connection, and the creation of clinical evidence of heart failure management using cohort and big data analyses. He published over 600 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including NEJM, JAMA, JCI, Circulation, Circ Res, JACC, EHJ, and JMCC, with an H-index of 98. He received many honourable awards, including the President’s Distinguished Lecture Award in 2019 from ISHR and the Japanese Heart Failure Society Distinguished Leader Award in 2023. He has been the president of ISHR International since 2022.