Introducing the Pulmonary Hypertension Community Call, moderated by Jason Weatherald

• Charifa Awada

After receiving her Scientific License in biochemistry specialty at the Lebanese University, Charifa pursued her master's degree in Cardiovascular Pharmacology. During her studies, she carried out a three-month course on cardiac rehabilitation, specifically on the training of respiratory muscles in patients with heart failure. This experience allowed her to confirm her interest in this field and to gain a taste for the world of scientific research. Since 2018, she pursued the opportunity to continue her studies and join the Pulmonary Hypertension Research Group as a PhD student. She is working on two separate projects concerning epigenetics in PAH and the paradox of tyrosine kinase inhibitors in the disease

• Sokratis Kariotis

Sokratis is currently a research associate in A*STAR (Singapore) originating from Greece. He has always been passionate about computer science with years of experience in industry and academia in several fields. Sokratis believes computer science can be a powerful tool to discover patterns and signals in complicated contexts such as healthcare. For that reason, he specialised in Bioinformatics and computational biology (Msc, PhD), machine learning and scientific programming. He has explored several groups of diseases and conditions such as cancer epigenetics, neuroscience and mainly PH genetics. A collaboration between several UK medical centres, has created comprehensive PH datasets, providing excellent means which allow a deeper investigation of PH mechanisms from multiple omics scopes. Sokratis spent the past 4 years exploring PH through applications of unsupervised learning to produce novel insights concerning genetic phenotypes of patients within subcategories of PH, aiming towards personalised medicine.

• Tatiana Kudryashova

Tatiana got involved in pulmonary hypertension research during her postdoctoral training. After she completed her PhD studies, which focused on fundamental mechanisms of cell migration, she realised that she would like to transition into area of translational research. Tatiana joined the laboratory of Dr Goncharova who inspired her with her translational studies on Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Since then, Tatiana’s primary research interests have focused on investigation of molecular and cellular mechanisms of PAH, especially mechanisms of pulmonary vascular remodeling. She is currently studying the impact of HIPPO and mTOR signaling pathways on pathobiology of pulmonary vascular cells from patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension. Tatiana is also interested in investigating sex-specific mechanisms of pulmonary vascular remodeling in PAH and development of novel therapeutic treatment options.

• Prakash Chelladurai

Prakash Chelladurai obtained his Ph.D at Max-Planck-Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Germany. He is currently working as a staff scientist at the Centre for Infection and Genomics of the Lung (CIGL) in Giessen, Germany. He uses next-generation-sequencing approaches to profile the epigenetic landscape in pulmonary hypertension, and also evaluate the translational potential of targeting the epigenome using small-molecule compounds.