Keynote Speakers

Barbara Casadei

Barbara Casadei graduated (cum Laude & Medaglia Teresiana) from the University of Pavia, Italy and moved to Oxford to undertake her clinical and research training. She was awarded the Joan and Richard Doll Fellowship at Green College, a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine in 1995, and a British Heart Foundation Personal Chair in 2012. Since 2024, she has been Head of the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.

Barbara is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, holds the highest honour of the British Cardiovascular Society (The Mackenzie Medal) and is Past President of the European Society of Cardiology (2018-20). She is the co-founder of EuroHeart (https://www.escardio.org/Research/euroheart#), an initiative that supports the assessment and improvement of the quality of cardiovascular care in 15 countries, and the incoming Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Cardiology (2026-). She is a member/chair of several Advisory Boards, including the Leducq and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. She leads a bench-to-bedside translational research programme focused on atrial fibrillation, spanning from investigations in human tissue to clinical trials.

Gianluigi Condorelli

Prof. Gianluigi Condorelli is Deputy Scientific Director for basic and translational research and head of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine of Humanitas Research Hospital, where he is also head of the Cardiovascular Research Area. He is full professor of cardiology and director of the post-graduate school of cardiology at Humanitas University. He is a practicing cardiologist who trained in molecular cardiology at Harvard University, Boston, and in molecular oncology at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia. He has been faculty at Thomas Jefferson University and at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla and director of the Department of Medicine, National Research Council of Italy.His work focuses on the molecular mechanisms of cardiovascular diseases and of heart failure. He studied the role of microRNAs and epigenetics in cardiovascular disease. Other research lines relate to the understanding of the mechanisms of cardiomyopathies to the identification of biomarkers of cardiovascular diseases and to the understanding of the role of innate and trained immunity heart failure.

Michael Murphy

Mike Murphy received his BA in chemistry at Trinity College, Dublin in 1984 and his PhD in Biochemistry at Cambridge University in 1987. After stints in the USA, Zimbabwe, and Ireland he took up a faculty position in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in 1992. In 2001 he moved to the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, UK where he is a programme leader. Murphy’s research focuses on the roles of reactive oxygen species in mitochondrial function and pathology. In particular he has pioneered the targeting of bioactive and probe molecules to mitochondria in vivo. This general methodology is now widely used. Prominent mitochondria-targeted compounds are antioxidants, such as MitoQ, which protects against oxidative damage in ischaemia-reperfusion injury. Murphy and Rob Smith developed MitoQ as an oral drug which has been used in two Phase II trials so far. This work established mitochondria as a relevant drug target and opened up the field of mitochondrial pharmacology. Recently his work has extended to determining the mechanism by which mitochondria produce free radicals during ischaemia-reperfusion injury in heart attack and stroke which is now leading to potential therapies for cardiac and brain ischaemia-reperfusion injury. Murphy is Professor of Mitochondrial Redox Biology at the University of Cambridge, a Wellcome Trust Investigator, an MRC Investigator, an honorary research Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, a recipient of the Keilin Medal from the Biochemical Society, an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and a member of Academia Europaea (MEA). He has published more than 470 peer reviewed papers, which have garnered more than 90,000 citations and he has an h-index of 150.