Professor Azfar Zaman is a Consultant interventional cardiologist at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital specialising in ischaemic heart disease, aortic stenosis and diabetes associated coronary heart disease. He is also an Honorary Clinical Professor of Cardiology at Newcastle University. Professor Zaman joined the Newcastle Hospitals in 2001 and was awarded Honorary Professor of Cardiology by Newcastle University in 2013. Following graduation at Leeds Medical School, Professor Zaman completed postgraduate training in cardiology at regional centres in Leeds, London and Cardiff. He was a Fulbright Scholar and British Heart Foundation International Fellow in 1998 to study vascular biology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York. Clinical Lead for Coronary Intervention and Director of the Cardiac Catheter Laboratories. In 2012, Professor Zaman was appointed Specialty Group Lead for Cardiovascular Research and have an interest in clinical research with a particular interest in atherothrombosis in diabetes and clinical trials.

Prof. Zambon is an M.D. graduate from the University of Padua where he also received his PhD in Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine. He trained as post-doctoral fellow at the Division of Metabolism Endocrinology and Nutrition of the University of Washington, Seattle, under the supervision of Prof John D. Brunzell, where he still holds the position of Affiliate Professor of Medicine. Prof. Zambon was a Visiting Scientist at the CHORI, Lipid Laboratory, Oakland, CA, directed by Prof. Ronald M. Krauss. Presently, Prof. Zambon is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Department of Medicine of the University of Padua Medical School, and the Director of the Lipid and Lipoproteins Core Lab of the University. Prof. Zambon has been very active at the level of national and international scientific societies. He is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Italian Atherosclerosis Society (SISA) Foundation, member of the European Atherosclerosis Society, past-Chair of the International Atherosclerosis Society (IAS) Regional Federation for Europe, Gold Heart Member and Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) Council on ATVB and currently a member of the EAS Executive Committee.

I am an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Following my MD and general clinical training in Greece, I completed a master’s on the Science of Stress at Athens University and trained as a psychiatrist at Duke University. I then did a PhD and postdoc in Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The overarching mission of my research is to elucidate how epigenomic patterns result from stressful experiences and, in turn, shape aging and disease trajectories. My lab’s interdisciplinary work combines large-scale analyses in human cohorts with mechanistic investigations in cell models.

Noam Zelcer received his PhD in 2003 from the Netherlands Cancer Institute/University of Amsterdam. Following postdoctoral work at the University of California in Los Angeles he joined the Department of Medical Biochemistry of the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam in 2009. Since 2016 he is a full professor in Molecular Regulation of Metabolism.

Postgraduate Positions and Scientific Qualifications Since 2014 Full Professor, Institute of Experimental Biomedicine, University Hospital, University of Würzburg 2012 - 2013 Associate Professor for Vascular Biology, Department of Vascular Surgery, Technical University Munich (TUM), Munich 2009 - 2012 Heisenberg-scholar and junior research group leader, Rudolf Virchow Center, DFG-Research Institute for Experimental Biomedicine, University of Würzburg 2007 - 2008 Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, Department of Pathology & Biophysics, Cardiovascular Research Institute Maastricht (CARIM), Maastricht, and Institute of Pathology, University Hospital, RWTH Aachen, Germany 2004 - 2009 Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Molecular Cardiovascular Research, University Hospital, RWTH Aachen, Aachen 2004 MD thesis: Institute for Prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases, LMU Munich 2003 - 2004 Internship, Medical Clinic I, University Hospital, RWTH Aachen, Germany Academic Education 1996 - 2003 Medical School, Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich, Germany

Prof. Zirlik is chairman of the University Heart Center Graz and the Dpeartment of Cardiology. He is an interventional cardiologist with profound interests in structural heart procedures of the atrioventricular valves. Scientifically, he shares a profound interest for the inflammatory mechanisms that orchestrate atherogenesis, its associated diseases, and particularly at the interface of immunology and metabolism. Lately, his group familiarized tehmselves with and leveraged single cell RNA sequencing technology as modern hyperdimensional tool for cellular expression patterns for detailed analysis of the immune landscape in murine and human cardio-metabolic disease. He is past president of the German Atherosclerosis Society (DGAF).