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Dr. Cao aims to elucidate the mechanism and clinical significance of exercise-associated myocardial fibrosis using the over 40,000 participants’ data from the UK Biobank and deep-learning algorithms. He will also perform multi-omics analysis to identify molecular drivers of fibrosis in patients with low/high exercise intensity and evaluate differences between populations. He will then evaluate for risk of pathological outcomes (e.g., heart failure, arrhythmia, etc.) based on exercise capacity. Dr. Cao is under the mentorship of Dr. Euan Ashley and Dr. Matthew Wheeler.

Dr. Ghazizadeh will study the pacemaker cells that precisely adjust heart rate to meet metabolic demand to understand how this “calcium clock” works. Specifically, he will examine the molecular mechanisms of stem-cell-derived cardiac pacemaker cells to understand how they optimize cardiac performance. He hopes to further extend the research to analyze ECG data from the UK Biobank to identify calcium sensors linked to heart rate modulation and recovery. Dr. Ghazizadeh is under the mentorship of Dr. Euan Ashley and Dr. Matthew Wheeler.