Peter Kohl

Since 2016, I have been with Freiburg University, Germany, where I am fortunate to be allowed to set up and direct the Institute for Experimental Cardiovascular Medicine. The institute is part of the University Heart Centre – with more than 1,500 staff and 24,000 hospitalisations p.a. the largest such centre at German university hospitals. The Institute served as the bedrock for a national Collaborative Research Centre (akin to British Heart Foundation Centres of Research Excellence), bridging natural sciences, engineering, computing, and medicine to ‘make better scars’.

Before moving to Freiburg, I served as the Chair in Cardiac Biophysics and Systems Biology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London (2010-2015). Prior to that, I spent nearly two decades at DPAG, progressing from post-doctoral research fellow with Denis Noble, to principal investigator, lecturer and reader, holding various BHF and UKRC grants, a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society, a Senior Fellowship from the BHF, and an ERC Advanced Grant.

My interests lie in cardiac structure-function studies, including myocytes and non-myocytes (structure) and bi-directional electro-mechanical cross-talk (function), which we explore utilising a mix of experimental and computational techniques.