Affiliation: Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology

Sara Pahlavan is an electrophysiologist and a member of Cardiovascular Group at Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology. She studied biology in her undergraduate degree and obtained a master degree in physiology from Shiraz University, Iran. For her postgraduate studies, she moved to Germany and joined Prof. Peter Lipp's lab where she learned state-of-the art simultaneous patch clamp and Ca imaging. There, she studied excitation-contraction coupling in cardiomyocytes isolated from healthy as well as transgenic Gq/G11 knockout mice. Doing her postdoctoral fellowship in Prof. Martin Morad's lab at Medical University of South Carolina, she gained insight on in vitro cardiac disease models using human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes. She used simultaneous total internal fluorescent microscopy (TIRF) and patch clamp to study Ca release from ryanodine receptors of sarcoplasmic reticulum. Using hPSC for in vitro disease modeling as well as advanced microscopy, she could mechanistically study the cellular phenotype of some cardiac congenital diseases. She joined Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology in 2015 and started a faculty position as assistant professor in cardiovascular group since 2017. Her group is working on generation of in vitro vascularized human cardiac microtissues to establish a preclinical model for mechanistic studies of cardiovascular diseases and drug testing as well as cardiotoxicity in platforms as close to human heart as possible. They are also interested in strategies to improve maturation of in vitro generated hPSC-derived cardiomyocytes. And last but not least, cell-based or cell products-based therapy of cardiac ischemic disease are investigated in preclinical models in her group.