Dr Michela Noseda leads a team of research at Imperial College London, studying heart failure to develop novel patients stratification and precision medicine approaches. She obtained her MD (Universita' Cattolica del sacro Cuore, Rome) and subsequently a PhD. Michela worked across the US (Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Baylor College of Medicine) and Canada (University of British Columbia) and is now an academic at the National Heart and Lung Institute. She uses genomics and computational approaches to study the cellular and molecular landscape of the human heart and drivers of adverse cardiac remodeling and, develops cardiac disease modelling based on human iPS-derived cells. She co-leads highly interdisciplinary projects and international consortia promoting team-science to accelerate discovery. She is an experienced public engagement advocate communicating how research will advance insights into heart disease that may ultimately alleviate the need for transplantation.

Dr Robert Hume is an emerging Group Leader and Lecturer within the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. He is also Lead of Translational Research, within the Baird Institute. Dr Hume undertook his PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK), before moving to Australia to complete postdoctoral training at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research (Sydney). Following this, he moved to the Charles Perkins Centre to work alongside Professor Sean Lal, Professor John O'Sullivan and Professor Paul Bannon, to form the Centre for Heart Failure and Diseases of the Aorta - a flagship partnership between the University of Sydney, the Baird Institute and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Dr Hume's research program focusses on developing Cardiovascular Regeneration therapies - aiming to help patients regrow their damaged hearts and arteries using molecular and tissue engineering approaches. To achieve this, he uses a range of iPSC-derived cardiomyocyte models, small and large animal models and live human tissue culture models.