2021 George E. Brown Memorial Lecturer – Rong Tian, MD, PhD, FAHA

Dr. Tian is professor and director of the interdisciplinary Mitochondria & Metabolism Center at the University of Washington. Her work is recognized in three inter-related areas of cardiovascular diseases: bioenergetics, metabolism, and mitochondrial biology. In the past twenty years, her laboratory has made seminal contributions to the field by combining a vigorous in vivo metabolic phenotyping with the powerful technology of multi-nuclear NMR spectroscopy, proteomics and metabolomics. Dr. Tian's groundbreaking work on the shift of glucose and fatty acids metabolism in cardiac remodeling, provocative at the time, has invigorated the field and brought metabolism back to the center stage of the era of system biology and precision medicine. Dr. Tian is also recognized as a world leader in developing mitochondria-targeted therapy for cardiovascular diseases. Her recent work on NAD metabolism, cellular stress response and inflammation has yielded a major stimulus to the translational research as heart failure becomes a predominant diagnosis in our aging and obese population. Under her leadership, University of Washington has conducted the first in human clinical trial of targeting mitochondria NAD in heart failure, which is followed by multiple in-kind trials across the world. Dr. Tian received numerous award and honors including Distinguished Achievement Award of the American Heart Association Basic Science Council, Research Achievement Award of the International Society for Heart Research, Marshall Distinguished Investigator of the British Society for CV Research, and Berne Lecturer of the American Physiological Society. She is currently the Editor in Chief for Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.