Dr Natasha Gorrie is a PhD Candidate and Cardiologist at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and UNSW. She completed training at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, with a focus on advanced heart failure and transplantation. Her PhD on HFpEF and cardiac amyloidosis focusses on genetics, early diagnostic techniques and symptomatic management and is supported by a NHMRC scholarship. Dr Gorrie maintains an academic focus with academic appointments at the University of New South Wales and University of Notre Dame as a Conjoint Lecturer.

Rhea Nandurkar is a final year medical student at Monash University. She completed a Bachelor of Medical Science (Honours) at the Victorian Heart Hospital in 2025 under the supervision of Associate Professor Nitesh Nerlekar. Her research focuses on women's cardiovascular health, with a special interest in improving risk detection and preventative screening for female patients. She is interested in addressing healthcare biases that contribute to the under-recognition and delayed diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in women. Her work has explored mammographic biomarkers, including breast arterial calcification and breast density, as opportunistic tools for cardiovascular risk detection in women undergoing routine breast cancer screening.

Anupama is a PhD candidate at Centre For Big Data Research in Health. Her research focuses on examining sex differences in the care and health outcomes of patients with acute coronary syndrome. She holds a Master’s degree in Applied Statistics from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Masoud is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Sydney. He has an interest in clinical medicine and medical research, particularly in the role of evidence-based practice in improving patient outcomes. His current academic interests include cardiovascular medicine.

Sam is a non-Indigenous PhD candidate based on Kaurna Country (Adelaide), working with the Black Ochre Data Labs team at The Kids Research Institute Australia. His research investigates the genetic contributions to cardiovascular disease in Aboriginal South Australian communities, working with the PROPHECY cohort — one of the largest Aboriginal genomic datasets assembled to date. Sam’s project encompasses multiple genome-wide association studies and the development of population-specific polygenic risk scores that better capture Aboriginal genetic diversity. By characterising the genetic architecture of cardiometabolic traits and integrating these scores with existing clinical risk tools, his work aims to improve the accuracy of cardiovascular risk prediction for Aboriginal peoples and support future community-guided approaches to genomic medicine.

Utpala Nanda Chowdhury is a final-year PhD candidate in the Shah Group at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland. His research focuses on understanding how common genetic variants contribute to inherited cardiac conditions, and how these variants modify disease risk in the presence or absence of rare monogenic mutations.

Associate Professor Mitchell Sarkies is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and Sydney Horizon Fellow at the Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney. He also co-leads the Sydney Health Partners Implementation Science Academy. With a clinical background in physiotherapy, his research focuses on large-scale implementation of innovations that improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. His work particularly examines how evidence-based interventions and clinical guidelines can be embedded into routine care and health systems. His program has attracted more than $21 million in competitive funding and is internationally recognised in implementation science. His work has influenced policy and practice across multiple fields, including developing national strategies to improve detection of familial hypercholesterolaemia and implementing system-wide clinical pathways to reduce unwarranted variation in care.