Affiliation: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA

Dr. Fisch is the Associate Director of a high-value preclinical research core at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. Her collaborative research projects are highly published and are publicly visible on Harvard Catalyst profile. Her primary focus over the past decade has been to create an agile, data-driven, collaborative research model that primarily serves two goals – first, it brings in revenue dollars into her research facility and second, executes robust and reliable preclinical studies to help the R&D pipeline of her clients in academia and industry. She was formally trained as a cardiovascular fellow at Harvard on a broad combination of skills ranging from transcriptional biology to in vivo disease modeling including surgery and non-invasive technologies such as high-resolution ultrasound/imaging. Her stint as a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in chemical biology on high throughput screening (HTS), large-scale protein purification and assay development led to a broad translational background in therapeutics discovery and drug development. Her PhD from Bowling Green State in Ohio was in the area of infectious disease. Her PhD thesis-Identification, Sequencing and characterization of Transhydrogenase, a mitochondrial protein essential for helminth infection of the rodent gut- focused on a classic animal model for a WHO classified tropical disease that afflicts millions of humans worldwide. Infectious disease and immunity have created a new area for recent collaboration, especially given the current pandemic.  The cardiovascular implications of SARS-COV-2 infection in the severely infected US population is profound and Dr. Fisch is using existing and novel murine models to study the effects of COVID on rodent heart by modulating genes relevant to cardiac function and by interrogating their nexus with inflammation and infection.