Lisa Gottlieb Becomes a Branco Weiss Fellow

An unavoidable aspect of being a researcher involves securing funding. It’s no secret that this can be especially challenging for early-career researchers, such as postdocs, who are not yet in permanent positions. However, opportunities do exist, and they can appear when you least expect them. This was exactly the case for Lisa, who last autumn was scrolling through SUND’s "Funding Landscape" page on the UCPH intranet:

"I was looking through the list of deadlines for various grants and happened to come across the Branco Weiss Fellowship, which I had never heard of before. It was aimed at postdocs like me, and there was a great deal of freedom in how and where the research was conducted – as long as you had an original and unconventional idea. It fit perfectly with the project I had been thinking about for a long time, so I had to apply."

Lisa, who graduated as a medical doctor from SUND, completed her PhD in Amsterdam, and is now researching the heart and its diseases here at the Department of Biomedical Sciences, where she is part of Professor Thomas Jespersen’s research group. Lisa's project, titled "Crosstalk in the Whole Heart: Combining Sparking and Pumping," is about an unconventional and new way of looking at the heart.

While the norm has been to view heart diseases as localized phenomena that originate in and can be confined to specific areas of the heart, such as individual heart chambers, Lisa believes we need to take a step back and view the heart as a whole:

"We know that the heart's electrical impulses and pumping function interact. However, we don’t know much about how impulses from one heart chamber affect the pumping function in another, and vice versa. Clinically, the different parts of the heart are often viewed separately, with their own diseases and treatments. I believe this development has made us a bit shortsighted. My research project aims to view heart diseases as disturbances that involve the entire heart. This can help us develop better treatments and guidelines that potentially target not just one, but several parts of the heart."

There is a significant need for the development of new guidelines and treatments. Although researchers know a lot about how the heart functions and how various diseases develop, not all patients respond adequately to current treatments. For example, a relatively large proportion of patients who receive a new heart valve don’t benefit significantly from the operation, and the reasons for this are not fully understood.

Lisa's project consists of three parts. The first and second parts use a complex model that measures the interaction between electrical impulses and pumping functions in pig hearts. Both diseased and healthy hearts are used to investigate how diseases in different parts of the heart affect the heart as a whole. The data is then analyzed and used to test new clinical guidelines, which constitutes the third part of the project.

"If we can gain more knowledge about the processes in the heart that influence whether an operation is successful or not, it benefits both the patient, who does not have to undergo a large and unnecessary operation, and society, which can save costs and instead allocate resources to more effective treatments. I hope and believe that this project has the potential to change our perception of the heart and its diseases and thereby – in the long run – improve patient care for the benefit of both healthcare systems and individual patients worldwide."

Lisa is the first Danish citizen to receive this grant, and SUND has no other Branco Weiss Fellows. This year, six men and one woman were awarded the fellowship. Lisa is also the first recipient of a grant for a project in the field of cardiovascular diseases.

You can find more information on Lisa and her project at the Branco Weiss Fellowship website.

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