Professor Peter Kohl, Chair in Cardiac Biophysics and r stems Biology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, UK; Reader in Cardiac Physiology at the University of Oxford; Senior Fellow of the British Heart Foundation. His research crosses traditional boundaries between fields (engineering, biophysics, biology, computing) and levels (ion channel to whole organ) of investigation, focussing at cardiac structure-function relations with relevance for cardiac mechano-electric interactions.
Professor Frederick Sachs, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Biophysics at State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo NY, USA. As the original discoverer of mechano-sensitive ion channels in heart cells, he spearheaded their characterization, aided by his identification of a first selective inhibitor of these channels. More recently he developed the first fluorescent probes that sense mechanical stress in proteins, and he focuses now on their application to dystrophy and other diseases.
Professor Michael R Franz, Director of Arrhythmia Research at the Veteran Medical Center and Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC, USA. His development of a non-injuring technique to record monophasic action potentials has helped to study electrophysiology and arrhythmia mechanisms in patients world-wide. His own research has targeted cardiac electro-mechanics and stretch-induced arrhythmogenesis.