Andrew, Scientific Director and CEO of the Heart Research Institute since 2022, is an experienced academic leader and entrepreneur with three decades of international experience in leading international universities. He has over 800 peer-reviewed full papers, over 230,000 citations and an H-Index of 179. He has more than 20 awarded patents. He has launched two successful spin-out biotechnology companies which have achieved licensing deals of more than USD1Billion. Professor Coats is a fully accredited physician and cardiologist in the United Kingdom and Australia, a qualified company director with more than 60 board years of experience, and a trained and experienced fundraiser with over $500M raised. He holds two higher doctorates (DM, Oxon, and DSc, Imperial) for separate research areas and has held senior offices in five major Professional Societies and served as President of the largest specialist society in his field (the Heart Failure Association).

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.