LQTS Advisor

Dominic Abrams is Co-Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Genetics at Boston Children’s Hospital, a new program providing comprehensive clinical care and translational research across the spectrum of cardiovascular genetic disorders. He is also a member of the Cardiovascular Genetic Program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. His research is focused on inherited arrhythmia syndromes and arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathies, with an emphasis on developing novel therapies which address the underlying genetic abnormalities, and understanding mechanisms of variant penetrance.

He trained in pediatric and adult cardiology at The Royal Brompton, University College and St. Bartholomew’s Hospitals in London, and was on faculty at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, as an adult interventional cardiologist and electrophysiologist.  He has a research doctorate from the University of London and MBA from the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

LQTS Advisor

Dr. Ackerman is a professor of medicine, pediatrics, and molecular pharmacology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. He is also the director of the Long QT Syndrome/Inherited Arrhythmia Clinic and the Sudden Death Genomics Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic.

In 2006, Dr. Ackerman became president of the Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation (SADS) whose mission is to increase awareness of the cardiac channelopathies and provide support for families affected by such heritable arrhythmia syndromes, particularly long QT syndrome.

After graduating from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, he received an M.D./Ph.D. at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, the Mayo Medical School, and the Mayo Graduate School in Rochester, Minnesota. He completed residency training in pediatric and adolescent medicine, fellowship training in pediatric cardiology, and postdoctoral training in molecular genetics at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. He joined the Mayo Clinic faculty in 2000. He has an avid interest in sudden infant death syndrome, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and congenital long QT syndrome.

Atrial Fibrillation Advisor

Dr. Dorian received his medical degree from McGill University in Montreal in 1976. He completed training in Internal Medicine, Clinical Pharmacology, and Cardiology at the University of Toronto and completed a Fellowship in Cardiac Electrophysiology at Stanford University. He is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology and in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Toronto, and a Staff Scientist at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, and is Staff Cardiac Electrophysiologist at St. Michael's Hospital.

Dr. Paul Dorian was the Department Director, Division of Cardiology, University of Toronto (2009-2019), and President of the Canadian Heart Rhythm Society (2013-2014). He is a recipient of the University of Toronto Department of Medicine Research Award, and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society and Canadian Heart Rhythm Society Achievement Awards. He has served and continues to serve on the steering committees of multiple multicenter clinical trials in arrhythmia care. He was the principal investigator of the ALIVE RCT of antiarrhythmic drugs in cardiac arrest, the Family study on predicting and preventing sudden cardiac death, the CIHR funded EpiDOSE Trial, and the Program to reduce sudden death funded by the Canadian Arrhythmia Network.

He has led a basic science research program on the mechanisms of ventricular fibrillation, treatment of experimental cardiac arrest, and the circulatory and electrophysiology of cardio pulmonary resuscitation. He has also been active in a research program on the establishment of optimum systems of care for patients with atrial fibrillation, including assessment of quality of life in patient reported outcomes.

He designed and led the implementation of scales to measure quality of life in AF, including the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Severity in Atrial Fibrillation (CCS-SAF) score, The AFSS scale, and the AFEQT scale, which are the most used methods for the measurement of quality of life in patients with AF. He is one of the core participants of the University of Toronto Sports Cardiology Program which brings together academic researchers, academic and community cardiologists, physiology researchers, students, and patients in the establishment of a clinical and research program in sports cardiology.

He has led studies on the incidence and causes of sudden death in competitive sport, and the diagnostic accuracy of the ECG in athlete screening. He has served on the CCS guidelines/position paper writing panel committee for atrial fibrillation, heart failure, ventricular arrhythmia, and athlete preparticipation screening. He has published over 500 peer reviewed papers and is Associate Editor of the textbook Electrophysiological Disorders of the Heart.

Atrial Fibrillation Advisor

Dr. Roger Damle was born in New Brunswick, N.J. and obtained his Bachelor of Science and his Doctor of Medicine degrees from Northwestern University. He then completed his Internal Medicine Internship and Residency at Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard Medical School and returned to Northwestern to complete his fellowships in Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology.

He joined the faculty at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 1993 where he helped develop the ablation and device implantation programs. During his fellowship and faculty time his research interests included basic mechanisms of ventricular and supraventricular arrhythmias and drug and device therapy for ventricular arrhythmias. He subsequently joined South Denver Cardiology Associates where he has been since 1997. There in addition to his full-time clinic electrophysiology practice he has participated in numerous clinical trials of antiarrhythmic and device therapy as well as antithrombotic therapy for atrial fibrillation.

LQTS Advisor

Dr. Nattel received his MD from McGill University in 1974 and trained in Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology at McGill between 1974 and 1978. He obtained Cardiology clinical and basic research training at Indiana University and University of Pennsylvania (1978-1981) before joining the faculty at McGill in 1981. In 1987, he transferred to the University of Montreal and Montreal Heart Institute, where he directed the Research Center between 1990 and 2004. He is presently Paul-David Chair in Cardiovascular Electrophysiology at the University of Montreal and Director of the Electrophysiology Research Program at the Montreal Heart Institute, where he continues to practice clinical cardiology.

He is Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, Associate Editor of Heart Rhythm and an Editor of the Journal of Physiology, and is on the editorial board of Circulation Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, Circulation Research, Cardiovascular Research, Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, Nature Reviews in Cardiology and Drugs. His research focuses on clinically-relevant mechanisms of cardiac bioelectricity, particularly atrial fibrillation, proarrhythmia, cardiac remodeling, ion channel molecular physiology and mechanisms of drug action.

Dr Nattel’s lab uses molecular, cellular, whole-animal and theoretical methods to gain insights into clinically-relevant basic mechanisms and identify novel therapeutic targets. He is also involved in multiple clinical trials, particularly in the area of atrial fibrillation. He has authored over 400 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, the American College of Cardiology and the Heart Rhythm Society.

LQTS Advisor

Dr. Marco Perez is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University Medical school, the Director of the Stanford Inherited Arrhythmia Clinic, the director of the Stanford Electrocardiography Laboratory and a Faculty Associate Director of the Stanford Center for Cardiovascular Diseases.

Dr. Perez completed his undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard University, then an internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.  He then moved to Stanford University where he completed his cardiology and electrophysiology fellowships. He then founded the inherited arrhythmia clinic at Stanford in 2010 and has been managing families with inherited arrhythmic conditions since then. He has studied the epidemiology and genetics of inherited conditions including LQT syndrome, catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and more recently, early onset atrial fibrillation.  He has also used bioinformatic tools to uncover genomic therapeutic targets for the treatment of heart failure.

He has been PI for several research studies including the NIH/NHLBI-funded WHISH STAR to study the effects of exercise on cardiac arrhythmias in the elderly and was co-PI of the Apple Heart Study which tested novel wearable algorithms to detect atrial fibrillation. He is now PI of the Clinical Coordinating Center for the REACT-AF trial which is designed to use wearable devices to direct use of anticoagulant therapies in patients with atrial fibrillation. His laboratory also studies the use of Machine Learning tools to characterize the risks of cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Perez receives funding from the NIH/NHLBI, Apple Inc., Janssen and the Colson Foundation.

LQTS Advisor

Dr. Wilde got his M.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 1983. After his PhD in 1988, he started his Fellowship training in Cardiology at the Academic Medical Centre, and was registered as such in 1994. Afterwards he specialized in clinical electrophysiology at the Academic Hospital Utrecht.

In 1999, he became head of the Laboratory of Experimental Cardiology, and in 2003 head of the Department of Clinical and Experimental Cardiology (Academic Medical Centre). He published over 550 SCI papers with, in recent years, a major focus on different aspects of inherited arrhythmia syndromes. In more recent years, genetic factors contributing to sudden cardiac death in the general population also became a focus. In 2011 he was appointed as member of the Dutch Academy of Science and in 2012 he received the HRS Distinguished Investigator award.