Guest Speaker Series: Dr. Andrew McCulloch
CMTM and CELL-MET Guest Speaker Series
featuring
Dr. Andrew McCulloch
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Location: Kilachand Center, 610 Commonwealth Avenue
10:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. CMTM and CELL-MET Faculty Session, Room 106C
12:00 p.m. – 12:45 p.m. CMTM and CELL-MET Trainee Meet & Greet, Room 106C
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Afternoon Seminar, Colloquium Room 101
4:30 p.m – 6:00 p.m. Reception, Kilachand Lobby
Dr. McCulloch is the Shu Chien Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Engineering and Medicine and the Director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine at the University of California San Diego.
He will meet with CMTM and CELL-MET faculty in the morning to discuss the exciting research being done by both Centers, as well as to share his experiences running a graduate training program, followed by a trainee Meet & Greet. Dr. McCulloch will then return to campus for an afternoon seminar presenting “Multi-Scale and Translational Mechanobiology of Cardiac Remodeling.”
The seminar is open to the BU community and will be followed by a reception in the lobby of the Kilachand Center.
Space is limited, so register today!
ABSTRACT: Multi-Scale and Translational Mechanobiology of Cardiac Remodeling
Heart failure is associated with maladaptive ventricular remodeling that impairs the ability of the heart to meet the metabolic needs of the body. There are multiple etiologies and phenotypes of heart failure that are frequently complicated by co-morbidities such as hypertension, diabetes or arrhythmia. For heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, myosin activators are a promising new therapeutic strategy. One such activator, is 2-deoxy-ATP (dATP), a naturally occurring nucleotide required for DNA synthesis that is only ~0.1% of ATP pool in non-dividing cells. Here I describe our multiscale models of the therapeutic mechanism of dATP from atomic resolution to whole cell and organ function. By combining multiscale models of ventricular mechanics with models of cardiac electrical activation, we have developed patient-specific models of ventricular electromechanics in patients with dyssynchronous heart failure and used them too investigate the therapeutic mechanism of cardiac resynchronization therapy. Finally, I will summarize our studies of cardiac myocyte gene expression in response to anisotropic strains and present a new systems model of mechanoregulated cardiomyocyte gene expression.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Andrew McCulloch is the Shu Chien Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Engineering and Medicine at the University of California San Diego and Director of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine. He earned his bachelor (1981) and Ph.D. (1986) degrees in Engineering Science at the University of Auckland and joined the UC San Diego faculty in 1987. He directs the UCSD Interfaces Graduate Training Program and the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Specialization in Multi-Scale Biology. Dr. McCulloch served as Vice Chair of the Bioengineering Department from 2002 to 2005 and Chair from 2005 to 2008. He is also a member of Qualcomm Institute, a Senior Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Leader of the Wu-Tsai Human Performance Alliance at UC San Diego.
Dr. McCulloch was educated at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in Engineering Science and Physiology receiving his Ph.D. in 1986. Dr. McCulloch was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of the Cardiovascular Section of the American Physiological Society. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Bio-Medical Engineering Society, and is currently Associate Editor of PLoS Computational Biology. He also serves on the Executive Council of the International Union of Physiological Sciences.
Dr. McCulloch has published over 300 peer reviewed research articles. His lab uses multi-scale engineering approaches to help understand, diagnose and treat heart diseases and to understand the biological principles underlying human athletic performance. They use experimental and computational models to investigate the relationships between the cellular and molecular structure of cardiac and skeletal muscle and the electrical and mechanical function of the musculoskeletal system in response to training and the whole heart during ventricular remodeling, heart failure and arrhythmia. The lab is also developing new methods to generate patient-specific models for clinical use and has licensed technologies to startup companies.
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