Shanna Hamilton, PhD

Abnormal calcium handling in the heart is implicated in many cardiovascular diseases and contributes to cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. The overarching goal of our laboratory is to decipher molecular mechanisms regulating calcium handling in the healthy and diseased heart. This will uncover new therapeutic approaches that we can test to prevent these arrhythmias and treat heart disease.
   
We integrate a combination of confocal microscopy, electrophysiology, ex vivo whole heart optical mapping and gene editing approaches to study these mechanisms in multiple rodent models of cardiac diseases, from molecule-cell-organ-organism. This includes models of inherited heart disease (catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia; CPVT) and models of acquired heart disease (myocardial infarct, hypertrophy and heart failure, aging, diabetes, atrial arrhythmia).