Mentor: Dr. Elena Aikawa
I am a Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Cardiovascular Sciences in the Cardiovascular Division of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I obtained my Bachelor of Science in Life Sciences and Mathematics (2015) from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I completed my PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology (2021) under the supervision of Drs. Michael Adams and Rachel Holden, where I was a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Vanier Scholar. My translational doctoral research focused on aberrant phosphate metabolism in chronic kidney disease and subsequent medial vascular calcification utilizing animal and human experiments, leading to the development of a novel diagnostic phosphate metabolism tool.
I joined CICS in 2021 as a postdoctoral research fellow under the mentorship of Professor Elena Aikawa as a CIHR Banting Fellow. I am using proteomic techniques and molecular and extracellular vesicle approaches to study cardiovascular calcification, specifically i) the role of post-translational gamma carboxylation in calcific aortic valve disease and ii) calcific lesion subtyping in peripheral arterial disease.
I am the recipient of the 2023-2024 Richard Gorlin Fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Keywords
- Extracellular vesicles
- vascular calcification
- valvular calcification
- chronic kidney disease