Prof Stefan D Anker is a German cardiologist born in Berlin, Germany. He studied medicine at Charité Medical School of Humboldt University Berlin, where he completed his medical degree in 1993. He later pursued research training at the National Heart & Lung Institute, Imperial College London, completing his PhD in 1998. Following his return to Germany, Prof Anker held academic and research positions at Charité Berlin and later at University Medical Center Göttingen before returning to Charité in 2017 to serve as Professor of (Tissue) Homeostasis in Cardiology & Metabolism. His work has taken him across multiple institutions and countries through long-standing international collaborations.

Academic History

Prof Anker began his medical education at Charité Medical School, graduating in 1993. He then continued postgraduate academic training in both Germany and the United Kingdom, completing his PhD at the National Heart & Lung Institute in London…

Dr Javed Butler is President, Baylor Scott and White Research Institute, Senior Vice President for the Baylor Scott and White Health and Professor of Medicine at the University of Mississippi, US. He is board certified in cardiovascular medicine and advanced heart failure and transplant medicine. His research interests focus on clinical trials in patients with heart failure.

He serves on several national committees for the American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health, and the Heart Failure Society of America. He is the recipient of the Simon Dack Award by the American College of Cardiology as well as the Time, Feeling, and Focus Award by the American Heart Association.

Prof Butler has authored more than 900 peer-reviewed publications. He serves on the editorial board of several peer reviewed cardiovascular journals and has been cited numerous times in America’s Best Doctors list.

Klaus Witte is a Cardiologist at the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular & Metabolic Medicine, Leeds, UK, where his research group focuses on patient-orientated questions with a commitment to enhancing efficacy through the personalised application of new and existing therapies in chronic heart failure (CHF).

Challenging conventional teaching around heart rate and exercise capacity in CHF, Dr Witte’s group has developed a reliable method to map the force-frequency relationship in CHF. Through this approach, they have demonstrated improvements in exercise capacity in patients with CHF and pacemakers (JACC-HF 2018, Circulation 2020). His earlier work also questioned established doctrines in this field (JACC 2016).

Looking ahead, Dr Witte is keen to address pressing challenges, including the escalating issue of health economics across Europe, the adaptation of care pathways, and the need to convey the increasingly complex molecular basis of clinical syndromes to…