POA2016

Dr. Akio Ishida is a graduate of University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan and trained at Ryukyu University Hospital. He has researched vascular biology at National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute (1994-1999), Osaka, Japan, then a post-doctoral study period in neurology at the University of Oxford (1999-2000), UK. Dr. Ishida is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Nephrology and Neurology, Graduate School of Medicine, University of the Ryukyus. His recent research interests include age-related and diet-related changes of arterial stiffness, blood pressure and target organ damage.

Professor Alberto Avolio, BE, PhD (UNSW), FIAMBE, is Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has acquired international recognition in the field of cardiovascular haemodynamics. He has taught in the fields of cardiovascular dynamics and in the broad area of engineering in medicine and biology and has extensive experience in PhD supervision and in examination of local and international higher degree theses. Current research areas include pulsatile relationships between blood pressure and flow, characterization of pressure-dependent indices of vascular function, cellular and molecular mechanisms of arterial stiffness, pulse wave analysis and non-invasive estimation of central aortic pressure, retinal vascular function and non-invasive assessment of cerebral haemodynamics, cardiovascular modeling and biological signal processing. He has received competitive and institutional research grant support and is on the assessment panel of national and international granting bodies. He is on the editorial board of journals of cardiovascular research and hypertension (Hypertension, Journal of Hypertension, Artery Research, Current Hypertension Reviews, Pulse) and is a reviewer for over 45 international scientific journals. He has over 200 publications including a book, book chapters and peer reviewed articles. Professor Avolio has been a Visiting Professor at the Tokyo Medical University and is external assessor of Biomedical Engineering curriculum at the University of Malaya. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering and presently President of the scientific society Pulse of Asia.

Professor Dame Anna Dominiczak (DBE, MD, FRCP, FRSE, FMedSci) is Regius Professor of Medicine, Vice Principal and Head of College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow as well as honorary consultant physician and non-executive member of the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board. This year she was awarded DBE for her services to cardiovascular and medical sciences.

One of the world’s leading cardiovascular scientists and clinical academics, Prof Dominiczak’s major research interests are in hypertension, cardiovascular genomics and precision medicine where she has not only published extensively in top peer-reviewed journals (total of 370 publications), but also excelled in large scale research funding for programmes and infrastructure alike (total value £70 million in the last 4 years). She has led a collaboration of four universities and four academic NHS Health Boards across Scotland to develop public/private partnership in Precision Medicine with a current value of £20 million.

Prof Dominiczak is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the American Heart Association and the European Society of Cardiology.

She is an immediate past President of the European Society of Hypertension and Editor-in-Chief of Hypertension, the journal of American Heart Association.

Prof. Schmidt-Trucksäss is convinced that well balanced exercise and physical activity is one of the most efficient life style components being at least equivalent to traditional drug therapy in its positive effect on vascular health. If arteries are exposed to increased exercise-induced blood flow the potential harm of measured and not measured risk factors may be neutralized or at best even overridden. However, exercise and physical activity have so many different facets that the most beneficial usage in prevention and therapy is a matter of intensive research which is still at the beginning, Schmidt-Trucksäss is convinced.

The Professor at the University of Basel and current Director of the Department of Sport, Exercise and Health, grew up in lower Saxony, Germany, experienced his medical education at the Georg-August University of Göttingen where he already acknowledged the great potential of ‘Exercise is medicine’ and studied sport science in parallel to medicine. Thereafter he worked at different places of excellence in sports and exercise medicine research i.e. at the Ludwig-Albert University of Freiburg i. Brsg. and Technical University of Munich.

Schmidt-Trucksäss started his research focus on exercise and the arterial system as early as 1996 with athletes establishing the concept of the ‘athlete’s artery’ and transferring it to the general population as well as to patients. As one of the pioneers in this field he used new imaging methodology and developed analyzing software to most precisely quantifying the effect of exercise on the arterial wall.

Somewhat surprising, Schmidt-Trucksäss claims himself to a certain degree as a coach potatoe. “As a former track and field athlete I always tried to train very efficient”, he says, “that’s why I try to find out the optimal cost-benefit relation of exercise and health”. This motto is also visible in the topics of his vascular research. He elaborates the dose-effect relationship across the life-span focusing in the recent past on the effect and association of exercise and vascular health in the middle-aged and elderly population.

Build upon profound clinical and methodological knowledge and involved in several societies and editorial boards driving forward research in the vascular system it is a pleasure for Prof. Schmidt-Trucksäss to give his presentation in the field of age, vascular system and exercise, and he tries to convince the audience that it is never too early or too late to let your artery smile - while exercising.

Audrey Adji is a recent PhD graduate under Professors Michael O’Rourke and Alberto Avolio from the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Medicine from Atmajaya University, Jakarta, Indonesia and Master in Biomedical Engineering from University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She has been working in the field of non-invasive central blood pressure measurement and its clinical application for over 15 years. Dr Adji has published over 30 papers in various scientific journals, presented in numerous international and local scientific meetings, received scholarships and grants and have won several awards.

Her PhD thesis was on “Non-Invasive Characterisation of Age-Related Changes in Ascending Aortic Blood Pressure and Blood Flow”, where she addresses the age-related changes of the ejection pattern of blood from the left ventricle in relationship with the central aortic pressure waveform. In her thesis, she also investigated different methods of non-invasive pressure measurement calibration and their (in)accuracy. Dr Adji is currently extending her research interest to the pulsatile relationship between intra-cerebral pressure and flow waveform with central aortic pressure, by using pulse analysis to study the ill-effect of high pulsatility to the heart and brain. These are important areas of research to improve the characterisation of cardiovascular changes with age given the ageing population and the related increasing health burden of cardiovascular disease.

Bo Fernhall, Ph.D. started his career with a focus on physical fitness and cardiac rehabilitation, and he spent over 20 years directing university based cardiac rehabilitation programs. This shaped his current research interests in exercise physiology with a specialization in cardiovascular function and health throughout the lifespan. He currently has an active, funded research program on the effect of exercise and physical activity on heart and arterial health. He is especially interested in the how exercise impacts the interaction of heart, arterial and autonomic function and how these factors are affected by inflammation. Dr. Fernhall research program has a special focus on aging, racial and ethnic health disparities and cardiovascular health and function in individuals with disabilities or chronic disease conditions.

Dr. Fernhall has been recognized for his work earning several awards, including the Distinguished Service award from the American Association for Active Lifestyles and Fitness; the G. Lawrence Rarick National Research Award for research in individuals with intellectual disabilities, and the King James McCristal Distinguished Scholar Award. He was inducted into the National Academy of Kinesiology in 2005. He is a Fellow of the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine.

Dr. Fernhall is currently Dean of the College of Applied Health Sciences and Professor of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Together with several other faculty he founded the Integrative Physiology Laboratory in the College of Applied Health Sciences at UIC in 2012.

Prof. Chang-Hoon Woo’s interest in laboratory research began while still a student at the school of veterinary medicine which prompted him to enroll in the MS program at the Chonnam National University, Korea in 2000. He was trained in biochemistry and molecular biology in the laboratory of Dr. Ho-Jae Han, and molecular medicine at the Korea University in the laboratory of Dr. Jae-Hong Kim, Professor of Biochemistry and Life Science. He began studying molecular correlates of oxidative stress- and eicosanoid-mediated inflammatory signaling based on several animal disease models including asthma, acute lung injury, and COPD.

After receiving his PhD in 2005, he came to the United States to obtain additional training in the field of cardiovascular research. Since joining the laboratory of Dr. Jun-ichi Abe, Professor of Medicine at the Aab Cardiovascular Research Institute in the University of Rochester, his work was to investigate the molecular mechanisms of diabetes-related endothelial inflammation. He found that diabetic stimuli inhibited ERK5 transcriptional activity as well as the subsequent laminar shear stress-mediated anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic responses via ERK5-SUMOylation. He proposed that inhibition of ERK5-SUMOylation might be a new therapeutic target for the treatment of diabetes-mediated endothelial dysfunction and diabetic cardiovascular complications. Most of this work was done as a recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship Award and Scientist Development Grant from the American Heart Association (AHA, July 2006 ~ Feb 2010).

In 2010, he started professorship at the Yeungnam University College of Medicine. Woo Lab has keep focused on studying the molecular mechanism of blood flow-mediated endothelial signaling and diabetic cardiomyopathy.

Prof. Charalambos Vlachopoulos is an Associate Professor of Cardiology at the 1st Department of Cardiology, Hippokration Hospital, University of Athens Medical School with clinical interests in hypertension and interventional cardiology.

Professor Vlachopoulos is currently Chairman of the European Society of Cardiology Working Group "Peripheral Circulation” and President of the ARTERY Society.

He researches arterial function and structure with special interests on the predictive role of arterial stiffness and central pressures for cardiovascular events, on the effect of lifestyle and inflammation on arterial function, and on the relation between arterial function and sexual dysfunction. His research interests extend to pathophysiology of hypertension, novel vascular coronary stents and the identification vulnerable plaque.

Professor Vlachopoulos has published more than 190 peer-review articles and has been cited in over 7000 referenced publications in international peer-reviewed journals and medical textbooks of leading international publishers. His H-index is 41. Together with Wilmer Nichols and Michael O’Rourke he has authored the 6th Edition of “McDonald’s Blood Flow in Arteries”. He has lectured extensively in international conferences.

He is a member of the Board of Hypertension, Artery Research, and Hellenic Journal of Cardiology and a Reviewer for numerous Medical Journals.

Professor Chen-Huan Chen was the former Dean of Faculty of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan, and has made significant contributions to the ongoing medical education reform, involving the new medical curriculum development and implementation since 1998. His teaching interests relate to general aspects of epidemiology, prevention and treatment of vascular diseases, together with research methods for cardiovascular hemodynamics.

His research interests focus on cardiovascular epidemiology, hemodynamics, vascular aging, arterial stiffness, wave reflections, heart failure, and development of new methods for noninvasive assessment of cardiac and vascular functions. His research works have contributed significantly to the understanding of the generalized transfer function concept in the development of the noninvasive central blood pressure monitors, and the optimal utilization of pulse waveform analysis in the general population and various cardiovascular patients.

Prof. Christopher Byrne trained in medicine at Cardiff, Hammersmith Hospital and Cambridge. He was an MRC Clinical Training fellow in Cambridge and undertook a PhD studying liver lipid metabolism. He was a travelling post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, USA and then an MRC fellow and Honorary Consultant Physician at Cambridge University and Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He was appointed to the Chair of Endocrinology & Metabolism at the University of Southampton in 1999 and was inaugural Director of the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility at Southampton until 2004. He is Principal Investigator within the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre. He has published over 250 publications related to metabolic syndrome and NAFLD and he was recipient of the Dorothy Hodgkin prize for research excellence related to diabetes. Prof Byrne is a founder member of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes NAFLD study Group and was UK expert Diabetologist adviser to the National Institute for Care Excellence NAFLD Guideline Group. He specializes in the management of patients with diabetes and liver disease and is Past President of the Royal Society of Medicine, Lipids, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Risk Section. He and Sarah, (Prof Epidemiology University of Edinburgh) are keen cyclists.

Dr. Ernesto Schiffrin is Physician-in-Chief of the Sir Mortimer B. Davis-Jewish General Hospital. He holds a tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Hypertension and Vascular Research at the Lady Davis Institute of Medical Research, and is Professor and Vice-Chair (Research), Department of Medicine, McGill University, all since January 2006.

Dr. Schiffrin’s research deals with molecular and cellular mechanisms of vascular disease and hypertension and their treatment, supported currently by a Foundation Grant from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (2015-2022) and an Industry discovery grant. He is author of 540 peer-reviewed publications, many book chapters and is editor of 4 books, on molecular and clinical aspects of vascular disease and hypertension. Dr. Schiffrin was Associate Editor of Hypertension (American Heart Association [AHA] journal) from July 2003 to September 2015, and since January 2016, Dr. Schiffrin is the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Hypertension.

Dr. Schiffrin is President of Hypertension Canada (2013-2016). Previously, he was Chair of the High Blood Pressure Research Council (now Hypertension Council) of the American Heart Association (2002-2004), and President of the International Society of Hypertension (2012-2014), and is now its Immediate Past President.

Dr. Schiffrin was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2006, and received the 2007 Irvine Page-Alva Bradley Lifetime Achievement Award of the High Blood Pressure Research Council of the AHA, the 2010 Bjorn Folkow Award of the European Society of Hypertension, the 2011 Excellence Award in Hypertension Research of the AHA, the 2013 American Society of Hypertension Robert Tigerstedt Award, the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Canadian Society of Cardiology in 2013 and of the Canadian Society of Clinical Investigation in 2015. He was appointed Member of the Order of Canada (C.M.) in 2010.

Dr. Ernst Rietzschel (associate professor) is Head of Clinic at Ghent University Hospital, Dept. of Internal Medicine. During his doctoral studies, he initiated the Asklepios Study on successful cardiovascular aging of which he is still the PI. ASKLEPIOS is a longitudinal study following >2500 apparently healthy subjects from Belgium. The study on this population sample (aged between 35 and 55 years) focuses on better risk prevention models (biomarker discovery & validation, screening), better understanding of cardiovascular function (imaging, heamodynamics) and better understanding of human aging (epigenetics). This translational study is a cooperation of several research groups within Ghent University with expanding links to other European and international research groups. The study has currently generated > 100 papers (of which >75% in the top 25% impact journals of the field) and 10 PhD’s. (Spotlight: Ernst Rietzschel,MD. Circulation 2008;117:f43-45 and Spotlight: The Asklepios Project. Circulation 2011;123;f83-f84)

He’s a member of Belgium’s Superior Health Council, the Lancet Commission on Hypertension (report due for global launch in Seoul in September 2016) and secretary of the Belgian Atherosclerosis Society.

Dr. Eun-Jung Rhee graduated from Ewha Womens’ University Medical School in 1997. She finished her residency training in Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea in 2003. She finished fellowship in Endocrinology and Metabolism in the same hospital, and has worked as a faculty member of Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism of Kangbuk Samsung Hospital since then. She is currently an associate professor in Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine.

She got her decree of philosophy in The Catholic University of Korea in 2009. She went as a visiting professor in cardiovascular division of Brigham and Women’s hospital, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA from 2010-2011.

She is currently working as a deputy editor of Endocrinology and Metabolism, the official journal of Korean Endocrine Society. She is also the secretory of committee of international liason of Korean Diabetes Association and the committee of scientific affairs of Korean Society of Lipidology and Atherosclerosis.

She has published more than 150 articles in international journals and her research interest in vascular complications of diabetes and association between metabolic diseases and vascular calcification.

• Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine & Epidemiology, University of Warwick

• Consultant Cardiovascular Physician, University Hospitals, Coventry

• Director of the European Society of Hypertension Centre of Excellence

• Head of the World Organization Collaborating Centre for Nutrition

• Vice-President of the British Hypertension Society

• Member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Panel on Nutrition, Geneva

• Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization

I trained in General Internal Medicine at Charing Cross and St. George’s Hospitals and completed a Master in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in London. In 1996 I was appointed at St George’s Hospital Medical School where I became Professor of Clinical Epidemiology in 2000. In 2005 I moved to the University of Warwick to take up the Cephalon Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine & Epidemiology. In 2012 I was awarded a High Doctorate (DSc).

My research interests are the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease, nutrition and health, metabolic abnormalities, risk in ethnic minorities, both in developed and developing countries and, more recently, sleep epidemiology.

I am a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP), Faculty of Public Health (FFPH), British Hypertension Society (FBHS) and American Heart Association (FAHA). I have been the recipient of numerous awards including the European Diploma of Hypertension Specialist (2002), the RCGP and Boots The Chemists Research Paper of the Year Award (2003), ISHIB Distinguished Researcher Award (2003) and the 40th Anniversary Gold Medal of the Lithuanian Society of Cardiology (2005).

I am Vice-President (2015-17) of the British Hypertension Society, I also served as Treasurer (2005-9) and Executive Member (2009-12), Deputy Editor of Sleep and Associate Editor of Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disease and International Journal of Hypertension.

I authored more than 400 publications in peer-reviewed journals and books (h-index=67).

Giovanni Veronesi, Ph.D., is an early career researcher active at the University of Insubria (Varese, Italy), where he currently holds a position as Assistant Professor. He trained in biostatistics at Milan, University of Bicocca, and Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, where he was awarded with the Regina C. Elandt-Johnson Master’s Paper Award in Biostatistics. His major field of application is cardiovascular disease epidemiology, and he is especially interested in cardiovascular risk modelling, social inequalities in risk factors and disease outcome, and population surveillance and disease time trends. He leads the statistical analyses of the MONICA-Brianza, a population-based prospective cohort study of middle-aged individuals enrolled in Northern Italy with more than 20 years of follow-up. He also has a relevant experience as project statistician in several EU-funded collaborative studies and multi-national initiatives. Outside cardiovascular disease epidemiology, he collaborates as statistical advisor to several clinical research teams active at the University of Varese. He has published over 30 publications in the last 5 years.

Gary F. Mitchell, MD is a cardiologist and internationally acknowledged leader in the field of vascular stiffness and pulsatile hemodynamics. He received his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis and completed his training in Medicine and Cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he served as a staff cardiologist. He left the Brigham in 1998 to become founder and president of Cardiovascular Engineering, Inc., which is a small business that designs and develops innovative devices for measuring arterial stiffness and uses those devices to examine genetic and environmental correlates of arterial stiffness and the role that arterial stiffness plays in the pathogenesis of hypertension and target organ damage. He joined the Framingham Heart Study as a Framingham Investigator in 1999 and became a collaborator on the AGES-Reykjavik study in 2006 and the Jackson Heart Study in 2010. Using devices designed and built by Cardiovascular Engineering, Dr. Mitchell has performed detailed assessments of arterial stiffness and pulsatile hemodynamics in more than 20,000 research participants, including participants in all 3 generations of the Framingham Heart Study as well as participants in the AGES-Reykjavik study, the REFINE study and the Jackson Heart Study.

Prof. Hao-min Cheng was graduated from Faculty of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan with the outstanding award among Graduate. He also holds a doctorate degree in Medicine from University of Adelaide, Australia. He has been a cardiologist for more than 15 years with the sub-speciality of interventional cardiology and echocardiography. As an associate professor in National Yang-Ming University, he has been granted the awards of excellence in Clinical and Internship Teaching numerous times. His research interests are focusing on cardiovascular hemodynamics, hypertension management, and evidence-based health care with more than 90 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and several patents in US, Japan, and Taiwan. Meanwhile, he has been involved in editorial and peer-review work of many international SCI listed journals. To achieve the goal of evidence-based health care, he has developed the innovative techniques relating to central blood pressure measurements and endeavoured to facilitate the technology transfer from research to industrialisation.

Professor Jeong Bae Park is currently a Professor of Medicine/Cardiology at the Cheil General Hospital (CGH), and Director of the CGH-Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at Dankook University College of Medicine in Seoul, Korea.

Professor Park currently serves as President of the Korean Vascular Research Working Group (www.kvrwg.org), Secretary General of Pulse of Asia Society (www.pulseasia.org), and Forum Officer of the ISH International Forum. He is also an editor of PULSE, the official journal of Pulse of Asia Society.

Having obtained his medical degree and PhD in Biochemistry from Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea, Professor Park’s research fields lie in vascular structure, function and mechanics (stiffness) of large and small arteries in human and experimental hypertension, and pharmacophysiology and pharma-epidemiology and clinical trials in hypertension. He is currently leading several multicenter and multinational trials on vascular aging and hypertension. He is also the author of about 130 original articles and review papers in the field of hypertension and vascular biology, which have been published in Circulation, Hypertension, the Journal of Hypertension and the American Journal of Hypertension, among others.

Dr. Chirinos graduated from Santa Maria Catholic University School of Medicine in Arequipa, Perú. He then pursued postgraduate training at the University of Miami William Harrington Training Program for Latin America, where he was a Internal Medicine Resident, Chief Medical Resident and Cardiology Fellow.

He subsequently underwent advanced cardiac imaging training at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD focused on Arterial Hemodynamics at Ghent University in Belgium.

In 2007, joined the Penn faculty as Assistant Professor of Medicine and Director of Non-Invasive Imaging at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. He is now an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Cardiovascular Division and the Director of the Cardiovascular Phenotyping Unit in the Clinical Translational Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He is also a physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Adjunct Faculty at the Center for Magnetic Resonance and Optical Imaging and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at Ghent University.

Dr. Chirinos directs an NIH-funded research program focused on the role of ventricular-arterial interactions in hypertension, LV remodeling, and Heart Failure. He also directs studies and a clinical trial related to cardiovascular risk in Sleep Apnea. He has studied ventricular-arterial interactions in population-based studies (MESA study, Asklepios study, PREVENCION study) and clinical cohorts. He is also the PI of several clinical trials (including 2 ongoing NIH-funded multicenter studies). His cardiac imaging quantification laboratory serves as the core lab for international clinical trials (such as Barostim HOPE4HF and NeoHF), multicenter MRI studies (such as American College of Radiology Network and various Industry Multicenter Studies). He has published >110 manuscripts and has co-authored recent guidelines in arterial stiffness and assessments of of ventricular-vascular coupling in hypertension.

Born in 1970, Taipei Taiwan, Lian-Yu Lin is an associate professor of National Taiwan University (NTU) College of Medicine. He is a cardiologist and specialized both in electrophysiology and coronary intervention. His interests are cardiac rhythm, cardiac image analysis and hemodynamics. His main interests are to identify cardiovascular high risk patients and help save their lives. He is good at math and is able to use computer program to analyze heart rhythm, cardiac magnetic resonance image and hemodynamics.

Michael F. O’Rourke is Professor of Medicine (Emeritus) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a Cardiologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. For 20 years he was Director of the Coronary Care Ward at St. Vincent’s. His basic research training was in arterial hemodynamics, working on experimental animals and computer models with Michael Taylor (Sydney) and William Milnor (Baltimore). His MD thesis was on “Pressure and flow in arteries” and DSc thesis on “Principles of arterial function in human physiology”, both from Sydney University. With decrease in prevalence of atherosclerotic disease, O’Rourke focussed on the aging process as this affects arteries, and developed new techniques (arterial tonometry and transfer functions) for measuring arterial pressure in clinical practice and for generating aortic pressure from non-invasive radial pressure waves. This led on to study of drugs, and use of new methods, including the CAFÉ substudy of the ASCOT trial, which showed superiority of arterial vasodilator drugs such as CCB and ACEI over betablockers, and explained results as due to greater fall in aortic and left ventricular systolic pressure compared to that recorded by the brachial cuff.

O’Rourke is a founding director of AtCor Medical, whose SphygmoCor device (with >1000 units produced) is used in major centres and major trials throughout the world. O’Rourke has served on the editorial boards of JACC, Hypertension and Circulation Research, and was editor in chief of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Medicine for the RACP from 1980-88. He has published over 400 articles in peer reviewed journals; recent books include the 6th edition (2011) of McDonald’s Blood Flow in Arteries. Recent research is into cardiovascular aging, using new methods of pulse waveform analysis to detect, explain and treat ill-effects on the heart and brain from midlife in asymptomatic subjects.

Dr. Prin is a young cardiologist who is interested in cardiovascular (CV) epidemiology and CV primary prevention. He finished medical school in 2001, then worked as an internist in remote area of Thailand for a year before heading to Oxford, UK to do some research on molecular biology. After that, he spent 3 years in residency training program and cardiology fellowship at Ramathibodi hospital where he was invited to join a longitudinal cohort study, named the EGAT study. His research career has developed through the EGAT program since 2007, now he becomes the project manager of this cohort.

The EGAT study is the largest (9,000 subjects in total) and longest (since 1985) in Thailand. It is, at first, designed to be a cardiovascular cohort but now it evolves into a cohort study of all metabolic and vascular disorders. The development of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, and unfavorable CV events are collected together with osteoporosis, arterial stiffness and dementia. With a repeated measurement 5-­‐yearly, this cohort becomes a true longitudinal cohort study that provides opportunities to do a complex analysis.

Apart from running the EGAT study, one of his works involves the development of Thai cardiovascular risk score. This work spotlights him to the national stage where he has to work with the ministry of health of Thailand on CV screening and CV prevention program. He has been chosen to be one of Thai delegates in the 69th World Health Assembly to make intervention on NCD and health equity.

Dr. Huang is research associate at the Shanghai Institute of Hypertension, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.

She received her PhD from the Shanghai Institute of Hypertension, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine. Her thesis topic was on arterial stiffness and wave reflections in relation to advanced glycation end products. She also received a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in this direction.

Dr. Huang also has substantial experience in clinical trials of hypertension. She was involved in several international clinical trials such as HYVET, INTERACT, QUEST and SAVE as an investigator or research coordinator. She has published her work regularly.

Professor Rhian M Touyz is Professor and Director of the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences and British Heart Foundation (BHF) Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Glasgow. She also directs the BHF Centre of Research Excellence in Vascular Science and Medicine. She is a clinician-scientist focusing on hypertension research, and is an honorary consultant at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. She was the Canada Research Chair in Hypertension at the Kidney Research Centre, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Univ of Ottawa until 2011 when she moved to Glasgow. Dr Touyz received her BSc(Hons)(1980), MBBCh(1984), MSc(1986) and PhD(1992) in South Africa. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Clinical Research Institute in Montreal. She has received numerous awards, including the Dahl Award (American Heart Association (AHA)), Robert M. Berne Distinguished Award (American Physiological Society), RD Wright Award (BP Research Council, Australia), Harriet Dustan Research Award (AHA) and Irvine Page Award (ASH). Dr Touyz co-chaired the Canadian Hypertension Education Program for clinical guidelines. She is past President of the Canadian Hypertension Society, past Chair of the High Blood Pressure Research Council (AHA), and current President of the International Society of Hypertension. She is Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Science, Deputy Editor of Hypertension, and Associate Editor of Pharmacological Reviews. She has trained 45 graduate students and has published over 370 peer-reviewed papers. Her research interests include 1) molecular mechanisms, redox signaling and vascular biology of hypertension; 2) vascular mechanisms of anti-angiogenic drug-induced hypertension, and 3) vascular biology of TRPM channels. She has a particular interest in translational research.

Prof. Sadayoshi Ito is currently Executive Vice President (Director of Research Affair) of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. Prof. Ito received his MD in 1979 and PhD in 1986 form the same university. Following clinical training, he had undergone his fellowship at Henry Ford Hospital in USA from 1982 to 1984. Although he came back in Japan for a time, he returned to Henry Ford Hospital as a Senior Staff Investigator in 1987. He came back to Tohoku University as Associate Professor in 1995 and then was promoted to Professor of Medicine in 1997. His research interests center on the mechanism of renin release and glomerular hemodynamics. Prof. Ito developed unique technologies for isolation and perfusion of a single glomerular afferent or efferent arteriole, or for simultaneous perfusion of both a single afferent arteriole and the attached macula densa. He demonstrated directly that the macula densa indeed controls renin release and afferent arteriolar tone. In addition, finding the similarity between renal and cerebral circulation, Dr. Ito proposed and proved experimentally “strain vessel theory” that can reasonably explain a close linkage between microalbuminuria and cerebro-cardiovascular disease. He has also been actively involved in many clinical studies (ROADMAP, ORIENT, INNOVATION, etc.) Dr. Ito’s elegant research has been appreciated highly and received many awards, including ASH Young Scholar Award (1993), Young Investigator Award (Inter-American Society of Hypertension, 1993), Established Investigator Award (American Heart Association, 1994), Academy Award (Japanese Kidney Foundation, 2010), APSH the trustee’s lectureship award (2012), Arthur C Corcoran Memorial Lecture Award (American Heart Association, 2014), and Distinguished .Scientist Award/Robert Tigerstedt Award (American Society of Hypertension, 2015). He served as a Chief Editor of Nephron from 1999 to 2002, and fills or has filled an important role in journals like American Journal of Hypertension.

Dr. Sae Young Jae is currently a Professor of Sport Science and the director of the Health and Integrative Physiology Laboratory at the University of Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Jae served 11 years as a Clinical Exercise Physiologist in the Center for Health Promotion and Sports Medicine at Samsung Medical Center, Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Jae was a postdoctoral Research Fellow supported by the American Heart Association in Cardiovascular Exercise Research Laboratory of the Kinesiology and Community Health Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Dr. Jae’s research interests are in the areas of physical inactivity and exercise with a specialization on vascular structure and function in health, disease and disability throughout the human lifespan. In addition, His research is focused on the interaction of risk factors and cardiorespiratory fitness on incident hypertension, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular mortality in the areas of physical activity epidemiology. He has published extensively on the role of exercise or cardiorespiratory fitness on modulating cardiovascular function in various high-profile journals within the areas of cardiology, physiology, and rehabilitation. Dr. Jae has received several awards for research from the Pulse of Asia Society, Korean Diabetes Association and Korean Circulation Society. Dr. Jae serves as an Editorial Board Member of the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise and PULSE Journal.

Salim Yusuf, Distinguished University Professor of Medicine, and Executive Director of the Population Health Research Institute, McMaster University and Chief Scientist, Hamilton Health Sciences.

Salim Yusuf is an internationally renowned cardiologist and epidemiologist, whose work over 35 years has substantially influenced prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Medically qualified in Bangalore 1976, he received a Rhodes Scholarship and obtained a DPhil from Oxford, during which he (along with Richard Peto and Peter Sleight) initiated the concepts of large, simple trials, and meta-analysis.

He holds a Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario Research Chair and has received (among others) the Lifetime Research Achievement award of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society; the Paul Wood Silver Medal of the British Cardiac Society; the European Society of Cardiology gold medal. He has been inducted into the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame; been appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, and received the Canada Gairdner Wightman Award in 2014.

He has published over 900 articles in refereed journals, rising to the second most cited researcher in the world for 2011. He is President of the World Heart Federation, where he is initiating an Emerging Leaders program in 100 countries with the aim of halving the CVD burden globally within a generation.

Professor Stéphane Laurent works currently as the head of the Department of Clinical Pharmacology in the Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou in Paris, as the head of INSERM U 970, team 7 in the Paris Cardiovascular Research Center (PARCC).

He is professor of Pharmacology in the Paris Descartes Medical School.

Professor Laurent has served as President of the European Society of Hypertension (ESH) (2007-2009), President of the ARTERY Society (2010-2012), and President of the French Society of Hypertension (2001-2002).

Professor Laurent was member of the ESH Council (2005-2013), is currently member of the Scientific Council of the French Foundation for Hypertension Research (since 2006), and is fellow of the ESC.

Professor Laurent was co-author of the 2007 and 2013 ESH-ESC Guidelines for the management of Hypertension, and the 2009 ESH document on the reappraisal of hypertension guidelines.

Professor Laurent’s research interests concern the arterial hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, clinical investigation and pharmacology of large arteries (arterial stiffness, central pulse pressure, carotid intima-media thickness, and endothelial dysfunction).

Professor Laurent is Associate Editor of Journal of Hypertension, Deputy Editor of Artery Research, and is member of the editorial board of Hypertension.

He is the author of over 360 referenced articles and 20 chapters in books. His “h” index is 63 (Web of Science), 70 (Google Scholar), and the total number of citations of his articles is higher than 23,000

Professor Laurent has delivered more than 350 invited lectures at international venues.

Dr. Toru Miyoshi is a Lecturer of Dept. of Cardiovascular Medicine at Okayama University. He graduated Okayama University Medical School in 1996. He subsequently completed his residency of cardiology at affiliated hospitals of Okayama University. After that, he had studied at the Cardiovascular Research Center at University of Virginia, USA for two years. Then, he obtained his Ph.D. from Okayama University Graduate School of Medicine. He is a board-certificated physician of Japanese Cardiology Society, Japanese Society of hypertension, and Japanese atherosclerosis society. He is also a fellow of Japanese college of Cardiology and European Society of Cardiology.

His clinical interests include the diagnosis and treatment of ischemic heart diseases. He has especially focused on non-invasive test of coronary artery disease. Besides his interest in clinical service, he is a basic researcher in the field of vascular biology. He is actively involved in cutting edge research and has published his work in prestigious journals as well as presented his work at several national Cardiology meetings.

Dr. Yuhei Kawano was graduated from Kyushu University Medical School at Fukuoka, Japan in 1974. He belonged to the Second Department of Internal Medicine at Kyushu University where Dr. Teruo Omae was Professor and Chairman. Dr. Kawano started hypertension research in 1976, and was appointed to be an assistant professor at Kyushu University Hospital in 1981.

In 1982, Dr. Kawano moved to Cleveland, USA to work at Cleveland Clinic Foundation as a research fellow. He studied the central action of sodium in cardiovascular regulation at Department of Cardiovascular Research where Dr. Carlos M. Ferrario was Chairman.

Dr. Kawano joined to Division of Hypertension and Nephrology, National Cardiovascular Center (NCVC) at Suita, Osaka, Japan as a staff physician in 1985. He was appointed to be a senior staff physician in 1987, Director of the division in 2001, and Chairman of Department of Lifestyle-related Diseases in 2011. His research interests at NCVC were pharmacological and nonpharmacological treatment of hypertension, blood pressure monitoring, target organ damage, neural regulation of blood pressure, and vasoactive substances.

In 2015, Dr. Kawano moved to Omuta, Fukuoka to work at Department of Medical Technology, Teikyo University Fukuoka as Professor and Chairman. He is managing the department and teaching internal medicine to many students at his hometown.

Dr. Kawano was a member of Executive Committee and Chairman of Salt Reduction Committee, and President of 36th Scientific Meeting (in 2013) of the Japanese Society of Hypertension. He is an honorary member of the society now. He has been a member of the International Society of Hypertension, and also has contributed to the Pulse of Asia since its foundation. He published about 1,000 scientific papers including 300 English articles.

Dr. Yuichiro Yano has been engaging in observational and interventional research on blood pressure (BP) for 13 years. The primary goal of his research is to determine BP phenotypes and patterns (including BP variability, circadian BP variation, and home/24-hour ambulatory BP) associated with future adverse cardiovascular outcomes, and to translate the research findings into policy and public health practice. His current research focus is to determine BP phenotypes in young adults that best predict cardiovascular and kidney outcome later in life.

Dr Yano’s clinical training in cardiology and academic training in epidemiology have provided him with the skills to carry out high-impact research studies on the health outcomes associated with abnormal BP phenotypes and strategies to mitigate the associated cardiovascular risk. Since 2012, when Dr. Yano came to the United States, he have performed research using data from a number of the leading NHLBI population-based cardiovascular epidemiology cohort studies, including the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults, Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, and Framingham studies. Under the mentorship of Drs. Donald Lloyd-Jones, Philip Greenland and George Bakris, he have become highly experienced in research on etiology and outcomes of BP variability, longitudinal modeling of cardiovascular risks, and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk prediction, as evidenced by >65 peer-reviewed publications and several scientific awards including American Heart Association Sandra A. Daugherty Award for Excellence in Cardiovascular Disease or Hypertension Epidemiology and Prevention and American Society of Hypertension Young Scholar Award. Currently, Dr. Yano is an American Heart Association (AHA) Strategically Focused Prevention Research Network (SFRN) fellow at the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and has been appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Yukihito Higashi, MD, PhD, is an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension, dyslipidemia, atherosclerosis, peripheral arterial disease, and coronary artery disease. He specializes in non-invasive cardiology using advanced techniques and novel clinical markers to assess vascular function, particularly endothelial function. He also tries to angiogenesis in patients with critical limb ischemia using various types of cells, including autologous bone marrow cells and mesenchimal stem cells, and physical methods.

Dr. Higashi has served as the primary investigator in numerous basic and clinical studies, working to translate his findings from the laboratory to patient care. Additionally, he is frequently invited to give lectures on the vascular function and therapeutic angiogenesis at national and international conferences.

Dr. Higashi has made significant contributions to medical literature, publishing more than 200 original articles in journals, including New England Journal of Medicine, Circulation, J Am Coll Cardiol, Eur Heart J, Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol, Hypertension, Diabetes Care, and J Am Soc Nephrol. He is an International Fellow of the American Heart Association and has served on editorial boards of prominent journals, including Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol.

Dr. Higashi is currently the Professor and Chair in the Department of Cardiovascular Regeneration and Medicine in Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine at the Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan