Hypertension, obesity and diabetes are leading causes of cardiovascular disease. Dr Maria Jelinic hopes to make this a problem of the past. Since completing her PhD in vascular physiology, Maria's research has focused on elucidating mechanisms that drive cardiac, vascular and renal complications in cardiometabolic disease. Her research investigates novel inflammatory mechanisms that drive renal and vascular complications in these disease states. Maria specializes in using pharmacological interventions and genetic modifications in rodent models of cardiovascular disease to test new therapeutic strategies that target immune cells to reduce end organ-damage in these disease settings. In her short career to date, she has produced 34 publications (with over 1000 citations), and secured over $3.7M in competitive funding. She is also passionate about training the next generation of scientists to build on Australia’s capacity in biomedical research and has over 12 years’ experience training both undergraduate and HDR students in physiology and pharmacology.

Associate Professor Nguyen is a head of the Genomics and Machine Learning lab and a scientific director of the National Centre for Spatial Tissue and AI Research. With supports from multiple prestigious fellowships, he established his leadership in addressing cancer complexity at single cell and tissue levels. He has led multiple large-scale projects/programs, funded nationally (e.g., ARC, NHMRC, MRFF) and internationally (e.g., DoD, NCI, Wellcome Trust).

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Cardiac Drug Discovery Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer. After finishing my BSc in Biomedical Sciences and MSc in Molecular Mechanisms of Disease at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, I completed my PhD in the Cardiac Bioengineering Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer working with Prof James Hudson. The primary focus of my work was to better understand why the endotherm heart fails to regenerate after injury. Using human cardiac organoids, microscopy and a multi-omics approach, I studied the regulation of the cardiac cell cycle. Since finishing my PhD in November 2024, I have been working with Dr. Simon Foster in the Cardiac Drug Discovery Laboratory. Here, I am following my passion for fundamental science and understanding why cells/organs/tissues work the way they do. I am applying my skills in organoid culture, functional analysis and microscopy to improve our understanding of the dynamics of extracellular matrix remodeling, how this impacts cardiac function and vice versa under physiological and pathological conditions, including fibrosis. I am also working on setting up a cardiac panel for spatial proteomics to map the spatial cellular and ECM interactions in response to pathological stimuli.

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 a number of 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. https://ramialison-lab.github.io/