Physiological Society’s GL Brown Lecture Event
- Time:
- 18:15 - 19:15
- Date:
- 28 May 2014
- Venue:
- EEE Lecture Theatre (32/1015) Highfield Campus
For more information regarding this event, please telephone 023 8120 6439 or email medevent@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Professor David Eisner (University of Manchester): “Calcium in the heart: from physiology to disease”.
Calcium is the master controller of cardiac function. It needs to increase on each beat to trigger the heart to contract to pump blood. It must fall to low enough levels between beats so that the heart can relax to fill again with blood. Heart disease, the major killer world-wide, is associated with abnormal calcium signalling.
It is 130 years since Sydney Ringer found that calcium is required for cardiac contraction.
Enormous progress has been made recently in unravelling the regulation of calcium but there is much left to do.
In this lecture Professor Eisner will present an overview of cardiac calcium signalling, showing how imaging, electrophysiology, molecular tools and animal models have contributed to our understanding of the physiology. The first half of the talk will concentrate on the simple, yet elegant mechanisms that regulate calcium. The remainder will focus on abnormal calcium regulation and how this can lead to some of the changes seen in heart failure as well as contributing to the origins of cardiac arrhythmias.
Speaker information
Professor David Eisner,University of Manchester,David Eisner (B.A. Cambridge, Natural Sciences, 1976; D.Phil Oxford, Physiology, 1979). He spent the period 1980- 1990 in the Department of Physiology at University College London. From 1990-1999 he was Professor of Veterinary Biology at Liverpool University before moving to Manchester as Professor of Cardiac Physiology in October 1999. He has received the Pfizer Prize for Biology (1985), the Wellcome Prize in Physiology (1988) and given the QR Murphy lecture at the University of Wisconsin (1992), the Reimer Lecture of the International Society for Heart Research (2008), the Dorothy Wedgwood Lecture for Young People (2008), the Peter Baker Memorial Lecture (2010), the Carmeliet-Coraboeuf-Weidmann Lecture of the European Working Group on Cardiac Cellular Electrophysiology (2013) and the GL Brown Lecture of the Physiological Society (2014). He has been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and to Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians. He serves on the editorial board of Cell Calcium and is a Senior Consulting Editor of Circulation Research. He is the Editor in Chief of The Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. Until July 2000, he was Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Physiology. He was previously International Secretary of the Physiological Society and Chair of the British Society for Cardiovascular Research. He was Chair of the Working Group of Cardiac Cellular Electrophysiology of the European Society of Cardiology and is the President of the Federation of European Physiological Societies (FEPS) and President-Elect of the International Society for Heart Research (European Section). He chaired the International Scientific Programme Committe for the 2013 meeting of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS). He has served on panels for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2001 and 2008 and is currently a member of the Biological Sciences Panel for REF2014.