Eric Olson, PhD will deliver the BCVS Keynote address on Tuesday, August 1 at 11:00 a.m. The topic is, "Thinking Big and Thinking Small about the Heart." Dr. Olson is the founding Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He also directs the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine and the Wellstone Center for Muscular Dystrophy Research. He holds the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair, the Pogue Chair in Cardiac Birth Defects and the Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship in Stem Cell Research.

Eric Olson and his trainees discovered many of the key genes and mechanisms responsible for development and disease of the heart and other muscles. Discoveries from the Olson Lab include myogenin and MEF2, the master regulators of myogenesis; Myomaker and Myomixer, the long-sought membrane regulators of myoblast fusion; the Hand transcription factors, which regulate cardiac growth and chamber specification; and myocardin, an essential activator of cardiovascular differentiation. Other discoveries include stress-response and epigenetic pathways that underlie pathological cardiac remodeling and numerous micropeptides that modulate muscle development and disease. His most recent work has provided an innovative strategy for correction of Duchenne muscular dystrophy using CRISPR gene editing. Work from Olson’s lab led to the founding of multiple biotechnology companies to design new therapies for heart and muscle disease.

Eric Olson has trained more than 150 students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have emerged as international leaders the field. Olson’s work has been cited over 177,000 times in the scientific literature with an h index of 227. His honors include:

Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998)
Basic Research Prize of the American Heart Association (1999)
Elected Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2000)
Pasarow Foundation Award in Cardiovascular Medicine (2000)
Elected Member, National Academy of Medicine (2001)
Inaugural Distinguished Scientist Award, American Heart Association (2001)
Louis and Artur Lucian Award, McGill University (2003)
Pollin Prize in Pediatric Research, Columbia University (2005)
Outstanding Investigator Award, International Society for Heart Research (2005)
Research Achievement Award, American Heart Association (2008)
Lefoulon-Delalande Grand Prize, Académie des Sciences, Institut de France (2008)
Passano Award (2012)
March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology (2013)
The Eugene Braunwald Mentorship Award, American Heart Association (2016)
Libin Prize in Cardiovascular Research, Heritage Foundation, Canada (2017)
Conklin Medal, Society for Developmental Biology (2019)

In his spare time, he plays guitar and harmonica with The Transactivators, a rock band inspired by the Texas troubadour, Willie Nelson, who created the Professorship that supports his research.

• John Calvert, PhD, Emory University
• Jiang Chang, MD, PhD, Texas A&M University
• Aikaterini Kontrogianni Konstan, PhD, University of Maryland Medicine
• Patrick Osei Owusu, BSC, PhD, Case Western Reserve University
• Li Qian, PhD, BS, University of North Carolina
• Gangjian Qin, MD, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham
• Fadi Salloum, PhD, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Yaoliang Tang, MD, PhD, Medical College of Georgia
  

The annual BCVS Scientific Sessions is one of largest meetings in the world dedicated to fundamental and translation research to improve heart health, a goal that the pandemic has only made more critical. Sponsored by the American Heart Association’s Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Council, the upcoming 2023 in-person conference in Boston, Massachusetts, promises to be the best can’t-miss event for basic cardiovascular scientists this year, attracting leading researchers in fields such as microRNAs, cardiac gene and cell therapy, cardiac development and most recently tissue engineering and iPS cells.

This makes BCVS the “go to” conference for intra- and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas and incorporation of new approaches within the cardiovascular scientific community while also playing a pivotal role in training young researchers, women and Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Groups faculty, and cardiovascular fellows.

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