OUR TEAM

Livia Hool completed her PhD as a Gaston Bauer Cardiovascular Fellow in the Cellular Electrophysiology Laboratory at the Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney in 1995. She was then awarded an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship to work in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.  Subsequently, with an NHMRC Peter Doherty Fellowship she returned to Australia and relocated to The University of Western Australia. She is Head of the Cardiovascular Electrophysiology Laboratory in the School of Human Sciences and has received continuous competitive funding from national and international granting bodies including the American Heart Association, Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) since obtaining her PhD. Her research focuses on the role of calcium in the excitability of the heart and in the regulation of mitochondrial energetics, with an emphasis on designing therapy to prevent the development of cardiomyopathy and heart failure.

Professor Hool is an elected member of the World Council of International Society for Heart Research (ISHR) and President of ISHR Australasian Section (2013-16; 2016-19). She is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, a Fellow of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand and a Fellow of the International Society for Heart Research. She develops cardiovascular health policy internationally (ISHR World Council) and nationally with Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand as a member of Scientific Committee. She is a member of the Heart Foundation Research Committee. She has held numerous positions on university committees, society councils including World Congress scientific programming committees, grant review panels for WA Department of Health, ARC, Heart Foundation of Australia, NHMRC and Canadian Institutes for Health Research. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Physiology (London), Current Opinion in Physiology and Heart, Lung Circulation.

Based in Busselton Western Australia, Nikki Glover has over 20 years’ experience with the Western Australian cardiovascular disease sector. As a founding board member for Regional HeartKids WA, Nikki has spent the last 18 years establishing a connection between HeartKids and regional Western Australia. This has included gathering information on heart disease and raising finances for the purpose of education and outreach for regional HeartKids.

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Nikki and her husband have two children with HOCM (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy - dilated and obstructive), and one child that has no known connection to the condition. With this Nikki has shared her experience at numerous speaking and fundraising events, advocating for increased awareness and understanding of the condition. She has also been involved in the counselling of HeartKids on a volunteer basis, and assisting with the establishment of St John Ambulance Western Australia policies and procedures for defibrillator training and awareness programs for the public sector.

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Nikki and her family are well known to the Busselton community, and are involved with many sporting and community based clubs. She now brings her knowledge and experience to the WACRA Board as a Western Australian ‘Consumer Advocate’.

Markus Schlaich is a renal physician and a European Society of Hypertension (ESH) accredited hypertension specialist with a strong background in clinical research. His main scientific interests focus on pathophysiologic aspects of hypertension including the contribution of the sympathetic nervous system, the L-arginine/nitric oxide pathway, their interaction, and the involvement of the kidneys. Professor Schlaich has a specific interest in treatment modalities targeting the sympathetic nervous system and has contributed to the development of renal denervation as a novel therapeutic approach to hypertension.

Markus has been highly successful in attracting competitive grant funding and currently holds an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship. He has authored more than 230 publications and book chapters in peer reviewed journals. For his work in the areas of hypertension, cardiorenal and metabolic disease he received 18 research prizes and awards including the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Medical Research Translation.

Markus has served on the Executive Committee of the High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia for 6 years and is an elected member of the Council of the International Society of Hypertension, and a founding member of the ESH Working Group on Interventional Treatment of Hypertension. After relocating from Germany in 2006 he became Head of the “Neurovascular Hypertension & Kidney Disease Laboratory” and later on Division Head of the “Hypertension, Stress and Obesity” Program at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Research Institute in Melbourne. In July 2014 he has taken up the newly created and MRF funded “Dobney Chair in Clinical Research” at the Royal Perth Hospital and the University of Western Australia. As Head of the Dobney Hypertension Centre he and his interdisciplinary team strive to develop more effective therapies for hypertension and its adverse consequences.

Carl Schultz is Clinical Lead of the Catheter Laboratory and Director of Clinical Trials at Royal Perth Hospital, Department of Cardiology. He is also a Winthrop Professor at The University of Western Australia, School of Medicine and Pharmacology. His clinical interest is focussed on understanding more about heart attack patients, and how to provide them the best care. Professor Schultz’s research interests include addressing the current gap in health service processes for heart attack patients.

Following 18 fruitful years as a cardiovascular biochemist working in the field of translatable cardiovascular research, Dr Helena Viola is now the General Manager for the Heart Foundation, Western Australia. Dr Viola completed her PhD at the University of Western Australia (2010, Distinction, top-ranked university-wide). She supported her research career with nationally competitive funding from the Heart Foundation and NHMRC. She has held several appointments, including as a founding member of the Australian Cardiovascular Research Alliance Emerging Leaders Committee, and Council member for the International Society for Heart Research (Australasian Section). She is currently a Board member of the Western Australian Cardiovascular Research Alliance, and a Council member of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health.

Aleksandra Filipovska is a Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic biology, NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and Professor at the University of Western Australia. She received her PhD in 2002 from the University of Otago, New Zealand. From 2003-2005 she was a NZ Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Fellow at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, the United Kingdom. In 2006 she relocated to Australia as a NHMRC Howard Florey Fellow and established her research group at the Perkins Institute of Medical Research at the University of Western Australia.

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She was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow until 2014 and since 2014 she has been a NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and Professor at UWA and the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research and established a Mitochondrial Disease Therapy group at Telethon Kids Institute in 2019. Her research interests are in the regulation of gene expression by RNA-binding proteins and the use of multi-omic technologies to elucidate their molecular functions in health and cardiovascular disease. Her research group uses genomic technologies and synthetic biology to design new models of cardiovascular and metabolic disease such as mitochondrial diseases and develop treatments for these disorders.

Josh is the research program lead for the Edith Cowan University Strategic Institute for Nutrition Research, and a National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow. He received his PhD from Murdoch University in 2009 and spent the next five years as a research officer with the Department of Endocrinology and Diabetes Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and an adjunct senior research fellow with the University of Western Australia. He then moved to the University of Sydney, School of Public Health before returning to Perth in late 2017 to establish the disorders of mineralisation research group at the Edith Cowan University. 

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Josh was the inaugural Raine Medical Research Foundation Alan Robson Fellow and has been a National Health and Medical Research Council Career Development Fellow from 2016-2019. His research focusses on the convergence between bone and vascular biology with a particular focus on vascular calcification. This research seeks to identify individuals with clinically unrecognised disease so that early nutritional and lifestyle interventions can be implemented to prevent the progression to clinical disease such as heart attacks and strokes. 

Dr Janessa Pickering is an early career discovery scientist working to prevent Strep A infection and the progression to Rheumatic Heart Disease. She has 12 years experience in microbiology, molecular diagnostics and host pathogen interactions of upper respiratory tract pathogens that cause disease in children. Her recent expertise is in clinical microbiology research, and she continues to carve out a career in the laboratory science of Strep A infection and carriage. Her work has driven the development of new standards for Strep A detection in surveillance studies, contributing to research studies in the Kimberley, and the Australian Strep A Vaccine Initiative. Being embedded in the END RHD Program at the Telethon Kids Institute places her at the forefront of RHD prevention research in Australia.