Affiliation: University of Padua Medical School, Padua University, Department of Cardiac Thoracic and Vascular Sciences and Public Health,

Saima Imran is a cell and molecular biologist at the University of Padova. Dr. Imran did her doctorate in the Biological Chemistry field at the University of Karachi, Pakistan, in 2008. Her thesis was based on screening natural and synthetic molecules for their anti-inflammatory potential using in vivo and in vitro assays. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed articles (more than 30 publications). She has been working as a Researcher at Palacky University (Czech Republic) for two years, from 2009 to 2011. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow (2011-2012) at Carl Tryggers’ scholarship at Uppsala University (Sweden).

Dr. Imran was selected as a senior lecturer for the Mobility Grant at Palacky University (Czech Republic) from 2013 to 2015. This initiative grant was to establish Stem cell-based research at the Department of Cell Biology and Genetics, her research project was to determine the mechanism of AhR receptor expression, and its target genes in hiPSCs derived motor neurons. During this period, she also visited University College London (May 2014-September 2014) to get research experience in the human embryonic stem cell (hESCs) and hiPSCs cells differentiation. There she worked at the Institute of Child Health.

From 2016 to 2018, she worked as a Postdoctoral fellow at the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine, Italy. Currently, she is working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Padova Medical School, Dept. of Cardiac Thoracic and Vascular Sciences and Public Health and Lifelab project under the supervision of Prof. Gino Gerosa, and her current interests are to decellularize scaffold of whole porcine heart and to apply hiPSCs derived cardiomyocytes to recellularized the cardiac ECM.