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. Harley Robinson is an early-career postdoctoral researcher in the Cardiac Drug Discovery Group at QIMR Berghofer. She completed her Bachelor of Biomedical Science with Honours at the University of Queensland (2016) and her PhD at QIMR Berghofer under the mentorship of A/Prof Michelle Hill (2022). Her PhD research focused on developing multi-omics techniques to study aggressive prostate cancer and COVID-19, leading to the identification of novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets. Dr. Robinson now specialises in proteomics-based approaches to investigate the molecular mechanisms driving cardiac pathophysiology. She leads the acquisition and analysis of proteomics, phosphoproteomics, and interactomics data to uncover dysregulated signalling networks contributing to heart failure. In addition, she is developing innovative tools for clinical applications of phosphoproteomics, supported by QIMRB small grants. Her work aims to advance drug development for cardiovascular diseases and improve therapeutic strategies.

Dr Corey Giles is Head of the Systems Medicine and Bioinformatics laboratory at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. He leads a program of research focused on understanding the mechanisms through which genetics and metabolism affect cardiovascular disease. By integrating biobank-scale data with advanced bioinformatics, his team is unravelling the molecular architecture underlying heart conditions. This systems-level approach is driving precise early diagnosis, risk assessment, and the development of targeted therapies.

Dr Fairooj Rashid is a Postdoctoral Scientist at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research (WIMR). After completing her undergraduate and master's training in the United Kingdom, she undertook her PhD at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Professor James Chong, where her research on human heart failure earned her finalist recognition for the 2025 CSANZ Ralph Reader Basic & Translational Science Prize. Her research combines spatial biology and translational cardiovascular science to understand the cellular landscape of heart failure and identify new therapeutic opportunities. Building on earlier work in cardiac regeneration and myocardial infarction, she applies multidimensional approaches to study human heart disease.

Professor Mirana Ramialison is Group Leader of the Transcriptomics and Bioinformatics Laboratory at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, and co-Director of the reNEW Bioinformatics Hub of the Novo Nordisk Foundation for Stem Cell Medicine. Prof Ramialison received her Engineering degree from the University of Luminy in France, after which she worked as a programmer at the ERATO differentiation project in Kyoto. She obtained her PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 2007 and joined the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney as an EMBO and HFSP Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2010. As an NHMRC/Heart Foundation Career Development Fellow, she established her first laboratory at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (Monash University) in 2014. She is currently a Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow. Prof Ramialison has delivered algorithms that enable the generation of new knowledge in our understanding of embryonic development and she is pioneering the field of spatial transcriptomics, having published the first 3D transcriptome map of the mammalian heart and the first visualisation of spatially-resolved transcriptome data in immersive environments. ramialison-lab.github.io/

Professor James is a cardiologist at Westmead and co-director of the Centre of Heart Research at Westmead Institute for Medical Research/University of Sydney. His research program aims to develop new therapies for cardiac patients including those with myocardial infarction and heart failure.

Dr Rebecca Harper obtained her PhD from the University of Adelaide School of Medicine and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health in the United States. She is now a Group Leader in the Heart Failure Research Group at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, Melbourne, under the leadership of Professor David Kaye. Rebecca’s research focuses on understanding vascular cellular ecosystems in cardiovascular disease, with a particular interest in how endothelial, stromal and immune cell populations remodel after injury and during heart failure. Her program integrates single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, lineage tracing and translational disease models to define how vascular and cardiac cellular states evolve over time.