Dr. Biykem Bozkurt is the Senior Dean of Faculty, the Mary and Gordon Cain Chair and Professor of Medicine; Director of Winters Center of Heart Failure; Associate Director of Cardiovascular Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine, and the Medicine Chief at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medicine in Houston TX. Throughout her career, Dr. Bozkurt has been recognized for excellence in clinical care, education, and research. She was the recipient of the VA career development grant and MERIT research awards, American College of Cardiology Proctor Harvey MD Young Teacher Award, American College of Cardiology Gifted Educator Award, Baylor College of Medicine presidential awards in Education, Lifetime Master Clinician, and Professionalism. She has been listed in Clarivate World’s Highly Cited Researchers (top 1% Web of Science) in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2023. Dr. Bozkurt is the Editor-in-Chief of JACC: Heart Failure. She served as the President of the Heart Failure Society of America in 2019-2020, led the Universal Definition and Classification of Heart Failure as the Chair in 2021, and is the Vice-Chair of the 2022 AHA/ACC Heart Failure Guidelines Writing Committee. She served as a Senior Associate Editor for Circulation; heart failure section editor for the Journal of American College of Cardiology. Dr. Bozkurt actively participates in clinical and translational research; provides advanced heart failure patient care; presents at national and international scientific sessions; teaches and mentors trainees and faculty.

Amrita is a Principal Investigator at Queen Mary University of London leading the Vascular Pharmacology Group. She is a translational pharmacologist taking her basic bench discoveries to the clinical setting leading experimental medicine studies and several phase IIa and IIb studies. Her research focuses on understanding the role of inflammation in cardiac and vascular disease with a focus upon the non-canonical pathway for NO generation i.e. the nitrate-nitrite-NO pathway and delineating the mechanisms that underlie sex differences in cardiovascular physiology and disease. She received the GSK Prize for Clinical Pharmacology (2012) from the British Pharmacological Society and the Women In Science & Engineering (WISE) Prize for Research UK in 2015 and was awarded Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2024. She was recognised for her high impact work being one of the Clarivates most highly cited researchers in 2023 and 2024. Amrita was Editor-In-Chief of The British Journal of Pharmacology (2016-2022), a Fellow of The British Pharmacological Society and is Chair of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR) Basic & Translational Section (2022-2024) and a member of the NC3Rs Review Committee (2017-2021) and the ARRIVE Guidelines Panel. Amrita is committed to equality in the workplace and has led numerous initiatives supporting both gender and racial equality in the workplace.

Professor Ritchie [FISHR, FCSANZ; FAHA] is Professor and Head of Drug Discovery Biology (Theme Leader) and Head of Heart Failure Pharmacology in the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), Monash University. Prof Ritchie is a cardiac pharmacologist internationally-recognised for her translational research focused on arresting the progression of heart failure. Her career spans discovery, preclinical & clinical research, enabled by long-term collaborations across Monash, the Victorian Heart Institute & the Baker Heart & Diabetes Institute.

Esther Davis is a cardiologist, clinician researcher and echocardiographer at the Victorian Heart Hospital and Victorian Heart Institute. She acts as lead for Women’s Heart Health at the Victorian Heart Hospital and is responsible for the development of the Women’s Heart Health Program and co-lead for the Victorian Heart Institute Women’s Heart Health Grand Challenge. In these roles she provides specialised care for women through the Victorian Heart Hospitals Women’s Heart Health Clinic and works to further research the unique aspects of cardiovascular disease in women. Her work with the VHI aims to further reduce the discrepancies in the diagnosis, management and treatment of cardiovascular disease in women and to increase the participation of women in clinical trials. Her personal research focuses on reducing cardiovascular risk in women with previous complications of pregnancy, improving pathways for the management of women with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, better understanding conditions more common in women such as spontaneous coronary artery dissection and understanding how we can improve women’s understanding of their cardiovascular risk by leveraging information in other routine screening tests.

Dr Kristen Bubb is Lead of the Translational Vascular Therapeutics Group in the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University. Kristen obtained her PhD at Monash University, before completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the William Harvey Research Institute in London, supported by the British Pharmacological Society. She then co-led a research program to investigate novel therapeutics and signalling pathways applicable to vascular diseases at the University of Sydney, before being recruited to Monash University in 2019 to establish the founding laboratory in the Victorian Heart Institute. Her main research interests are to investigate inflammatory and redox signalling in vascular diseases, with the aim of developing novel therapeutics for atherosclerosis, pulmonary hypertension and pre-eclampsia.