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Antonio Giordano, MD, PhD, is an oncologist and geneticist, as well as founder and president of the Sbarro Health Research Organization and director of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He works on molecular therapeutics and also studies the connections between obesity and cancer. Antonio Giordano grew up in Naples, Italy, where his father, Giovan Giacomo Giordano, was an oncologist and pathologist at the National Cancer Institute of Naples and a professor at the University of Naples. Giordano decided to branch out and start a career in research that was more oriented towards genetics applied to pathology. Early on, while following his father's research, he became interested in the link between the effect of toxic waste on the environment and the increasing cancer rates in the Campania region in Italy. Giordano earned his medical degree at the University of Naples in 1986, and his doctorate at the University of Trieste in 1990. He has published over 600 papers on gene therapy, cell cycle, genetics of cancer, and epidemiology. His early research includes seminal work done in 1989, demonstrating the importance of cell cycle proteins in the functioning of DNA tumor viruses. The transforming gene products of these viruses, such as the E1A oncoproteins of adenovirus 5, led to the identification of cellular factor p60, known as cyclin A. This research was the first demonstration of a physical link between cellular transformation and the cell cycle, thereby paving the way for the melding of these two areas of research. It also helped to open a very exciting avenue of research involving investigators with expertise in different aspects of growth control and cancer.Giordano’s lab also discovered the tumor suppressor gene RB2/p130 and the cell cycle kinases CDK9 and CDK10, two other key players in cell cycle regulation and cell differentiation. Antonio Giordano is the recipient of the Irving J. Selikoff Award for Cancer Research, the Rotary International Award, and Lions Club Napoli-Europa. He has also received the title of Knight of the Republic and Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. At the 25th anniversary of the National Organization of Italian American Women, he was awarded the Cross of Merit Melitense, an honor of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. www.shro.org www.drantoniogiordano.com

Dr. Sharma is a trained dietitian and physical therapist. As a health professional, she strongly felt she was treating preventable diseases stemming from poor lifestyles: heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension. She saw the repercussions were devastating to the community. Her love for teaching, academics and the community-led her to pursue a Ph.D. in public health, focusing on epidemiology. Her interest is in nutrition and physical activity-based interventions to address obesity via school, family, and the community, predominantly in low-income minority populations. She co-founded Brighter Bites, a partner program of the Houston Food Bank, and serves on the Mayor of Houston’s Go Healthy Houston Task Force. She is currently working on Healthy Eating Active Living (HE/AL). Dr. Sharma explains, “HE/AL is designed to promote healthy birth outcomes and prevent maternally and childhood obesity among low-income Medicaid patients. The project will use evidence-based strategies from Brighter Bites, Legacy of Health, and The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre to promote breastfeeding and physical activity among pregnant women and women with infants. Families will receive free group education classes (nutrition, cooking, and exercise) and 30 lbs of fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables weekly for 12 weeks. We will be tracking the effect of the program on maternal weight gain during pregnancy, gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension, infant birth weight, breastfeeding, and infant weight gain in the first year of life.”

Glenn Gaesser is an expert in the impact of exercise, diet and cardiovascular health.

Gaesser's work has included exercise training interventions, muscular efficiency, and oxygen uptake during and after exercise. He's an advocate of breaking long periods of stagnance with physical activity. He speaks on the notion of health at any size, supporting a non-weight-loss-centered approach to treating obesity-related health issues. Metabolic efficiency and dietary habits are a major part of his work.

Gaesser is the center director for the College of Health Solution and a professor of Exercise Physiology.

He has served as the Southwest Chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine. He has also worked with the Center for Disease Control and has collaborated with NASA as well.

Dr. Wendy Post is professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and holds a joint appointment as professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the Lou and Nancy Grasmick Professor of Cardiology. Dr. Post is a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease and the Echocardiography Laboratory and is associate faculty at the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research at Johns Hopkins University. She is Director of Cardiovascular Research for the Division of Cardiology and Director of Research for the Hopkins Cardiovascular Fellowship Training Program. Dr. Post received her undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard University. She earned her medical degree from Columbia College of Surgeons and Physicians, Columbia University. After completing her internship and residency at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital, Dr. Post received her master’s degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. She was a research fellow at the Framingham Heart Study, in Framingham, Mass., and completed a fellowship in cardiology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Post joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1997. Dr. Post’s research interests include prediction and prevention of coronary heart disease and sudden cardiac death, noninvasive imaging of subclinical atherosclerosis, genetics of cardiovascular disease, sex and racial/ethnic differences in cardiovascular disease, and cardiovascular disease in HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. She is the chair of the steering committee, and the principal investigator for the Hopkins field center for the NIH-funded Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) and for the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) Cardiovascular Disease sub-study. She has been the PI for three R01 grants from NHLBI investigating cardiovascular disease in HIV, and is dual PI on the cardiology NHLBI training grant, which has been continuously funded for over 45 years. Dr. Post is a manuscript reviewer for multiple publications and is currently associate editor of Circulation. She has over 350 peer-reviewed research publications. Dr. Post was elected as a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2015. She mentors multiple medical students, medical house staff, fellows and junior faculty. She was a member of the Hopkins Professorial Promotions Committee and a former Johns Hopkins University Provost Fellow.

David A. Kass, M.D. is the Abraham and Virginia Weiss Professor of Cardiology, and Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, and in the graduate programs of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Pathobiology. He received his B.A. in Applied Physics & Engineering from Harvard University in 1975 and M.D. from Yale University School of Medicine in 1980. He completed residency in Internal Medicine at George Washington University in 1983, and Cardiovascular Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 1986. Among his many honors are the 2020 Louis and Artur Lucien Prize in Cardiovascular Disease, the Pater Harris Distinguished Scientist Award and Innovator Award from ISHR in 2018 and 2020, Outstanding Investigator Award from the NIH, 2008 Basic Science Achievement Award from the American Heart Association, and Distinction in Teaching and Mentorship, and Clinical Innovator and Mentor Awards from Johns Hopkins University. He has trained over 100 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, most now in academic research and leadership positions at institutions throughout the world. Dr. Kass directs the Johns Hopkins Institute of CardioScience (ICS), and is co-director of an NIH T32 post-doctoral fellowship program in cardiovascular research that is approaching a half century of support. Dr. Kass' research aims to expand our understanding of cardiac disease in its many manifestations, to identify novel mechanisms and avenues for treatment, and ultimately translate them to therapies in the clinic. Under his Directorship, the ICS broadly works to understand causes of cardiovascular disease using molecular and cellular biology, organ and whole animal models, regenerative medicine approaches, and bio-engineering to develop new methods for diagnosis and treatment. In his lab, Dr. Kass and colleagues have discovered a number of new methods to treat heart failure with depressed heart function, including a form of nitric oxide called nitroxyl, an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase type 1 and type 9, a mutant form of a protein involved with protein quality control called Chip, and using a novel pacemaker strategy termed PITA. He pioneered research into how a major enzyme known as Protein Kinase G functions in the heart muscle, and how its activation can benefit heart disease. This has resulted in new discoveries with applications to heart failure, obesity, muscular dystrophy, cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis, and even immune-cancer therapy. In addition, his laboratory is dissecting the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying right heart disease associated with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), pulmonary hypertension from systemic sclerosis, and cardiometabolic disease. His lab is funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, and industry pursuing early-stage research therapy development. Ongoing investigations are addressing the mechanisms and impact of stimulating cyclic GMP synthesis and/or blocking its catabolism by selective phosphodiesterases on heart disease, obesity, and cardiometabolic syndrome. Besides the well know phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibited by drugs such as Viagra®, the Kass lab uncovered a cardiac role for phosphodiesterase type 9 that has since led to multiple clinical trials of PDE9 inhibitors in patients with heart failure. They uncovered how the cGMP-protein kinase G pathway intersects with a master growth and metabolism regulator, mTORC1, and this has implications for improving immunotherapy for the heart and cancer, work now ongoing. They also found how the protein Chip can be stabilized to help reduce abnormal protein accumulation and toxicity after a heart attack. This work is also being actively translated into a potential gene therapy for heart disease. Clinical research is dissecting basic mechanisms for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, pulmonary hypertension, and testing new drugs such as PDE1 inhibitors for heart failure therapies.

Dr. Sanjay Rajagopalan is the Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine for University Hospitals Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute, the Herman K. Hellerstein, MD Professor of Cardiovascular Research, and Director of the Case Cardiovascular Research Institute at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Rajagopalan completed internal medicine training, including serving as Chief Resident, at SUNY (Buffalo, New York), Clinical and Research Fellowships in Cardiovascular Medicine/Vascular Biology at the Emory University School of Medicine (Atlanta, Georgia) and Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging training at Duke University Medical Center (Durham, North Carolina). Dr. Rajagopalan is among an elite group of physician scientists whose work has helped transform global perceptions of the impact of the environment on cardiovascular health. He is passionate about technology innovation in cardiovascular medicine for the development of personalized approaches to heart disease prevention. Dr. Rajagopalan is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), American Association of Physicians (AAP), Association of University Cardiologists (AUC) and the Association of Professors of Cardiology (APC).

, is a board-certified cardiologist and medical director of heart transplant and mechanical circulatory support. He specializes in advanced heart failure, mechanical circulatory support and cardiac transplantation.
As a professor of medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, Adler conducts research on the use of stem cells to treat cardiovascular disease. He is also an investigator for many clinical trials for all stages of heart failure.
Adler's work has been featured in the world's top journals, including Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and Circulation. He speaks throughout the country on topics related to heart failure and stem cell biology.

Dariush Mozaffarian is a board-certified cardiologist and epidemiologist whose research focuses on the effects of diet and lifestyle on cardiometabolic health, including global impacts of suboptimal diet and effectiveness of policies to improve diets around the world. His work aims to create the science and translation for a food system that is nutritious, equitable, and sustainable. He is the Jean Mayer Professor of Nutrition and the inaugural director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.