Peter Kohl

Since 2016, I have been with Freiburg University, Germany, where I was 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. one of the largest such centres 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’. It now heads an initiative to recognise the interstitium as a key determinant of cardiac function. We also host an English-language advanced MSc in Medical Sciences - Cardiovascular Research as part of a 1+3-year graduate training programme.

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 and their bi-directional electro-mechanical cross-talk, which we explore utilising a mix of experimental and computational techniques.