Moise awarded American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship
Congratulations to Nick Moise for recently being awarded a 2-year American Heart Association(AHA) post-doctoral fellowship for his research titled ‘Regulation of Cardiac Conduction by Intercalated Disk Nanoscale Structure.’
Project Summary: Arrhythmias are one of the most common reasons for disease and disability. Despite recent findings that some arrhythmias can be caused by damaged junctions between heart cells, the role of these junctions on heart disease have so far not been thoroughly studied, due to their complex structure. In this project, I will use microscopic measurements of these junctions to replicate their structure in a computer model. Using this computer model, I can then predict their role in the heart's electrical activity. Changes in these structures (which can be damaged in heart disease) may be important. My proposed project will allow for thorough and direct study of these structure changes in a computer model. By using the model to find the impact of this damage, we can understand heart disease better. Microscopic measurements of these junctions can be used to diagnose heart disease and predict its course. Finally, we can predict new treatments that repair the junctions between cells and test their efficacy in the model.
Moise is currently a postdoc in Dr. Weinberg’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He finished medical school in 2019 in Bucharest, Romania. While a student, he became interested in computational biology, especially in inflammatory networks and cardiac electrophysiology. This interest led to a collaboration with Prof. Avner Friedman from the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at OSU, studying mathematical models of autoimmune diseases. After finishing his studies, he started his postdoc in Dr. Weinberg’s lab and is currently developing models of cardiac conduction that incorporate the detailed structure of cardiac intercalated disks.
