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Mark Mercola

Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular) and, by courtesy, of Chemical and Systems Biology

BioDr. Mercola is Professor of Medicine and Professor in the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute. He completed postdoctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, was on the faculty in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School for 12 years, and later at the Sanford-Burnham-Prebys Institute and Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego before relocating to Stanford in 2015.

Prof. Mercola is known for identifying many of the factors that are responsible for inducing and forming the heart, including the discovery that Wnt inhibition is a critical step in cardiogenesis that provided the conceptual basis and reagents for the large-scale production of cardiovascular tissues from pluripotent stem cells. He has collaborated with medicinal chemists, optical engineers and software developers to pioneer the use of patient iPSC-cardiomyocytes for disease modeling, safety pharmacology and drug development. His academic research is focused on developing and using quantitative high throughput assays of patient-specific cardiomyocyte function to discover druggable targets for preserving contractile function in heart failure and promoting regeneration following ischemic injury. He co-established drug screening and assay development at the Conrad Prebys Drug Discovery Center (San Diego), which operated as one of 4 large screening centers of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Molecular Libraries screening initiative and continues as one of the largest academic drug screening centers.

Prof. Mercola received an NIH MERIT award for his work on heart formation. He holds numerous patents, including describing the invention of the first engineered dominant negative protein and small molecules for stem cell and cancer applications. He serves on multiple editorial and advisory boards, including Vala Sciences, Regencor, The Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research and the Human Biomolecular Research Institute. His laboratory is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Phospholamban Foundation and Fondation Leducq.

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http://web.stanford.edu/people/mmercola

Dr Tom Meredith, MD, PhD

Clinical Assistant Professor, Medicine - Cardiovascular Medicine

BioDr Tom Meredith, born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, is an academic interventional cardiologist and a clinical assistant professor at Stanford. He completed his medical and cardiology specialty training through the University of New South Wales and St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia. After obtaining Fellowship at the Royal Australian College of Physicians, he completed three years of coronary and structural interventional training across St Vincent’s Hospital and Stanford. Alongside his clinical training, he completed a master's degree in clinical trials research as well as a PhD through the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, supported by competitive scholarship funding from the CSANZ and the Australian National Heart Foundation. During his PhD he developed and patented a novel algorithm to predict aortic stenosis severity from single-view echocardiography and his thesis was ultimately nominated for the Dean's Award. His research interests include cardiac remodelling in valvular heart disease and the application of supervised machine-learning methods to predict post-procedural outcomes. Outside medicine, Tom is a dedicated father and avid triathlete who has competed in multiple Ironman 70.3 World Championships.