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…

Prof Mark Petrie is Professor of Cardiology in the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK. Prof Petrie started his studies as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, before training in cardiology in Glasgow. He worked as a heart failure and interventional cardiologist for many years before transferring to the University of Glasgow in 2016.

Prof Petrie's research interests focus on diabetes and cardiovascular disease in heart failure, structural intervention and revascularization in heart failure, peripartum cardiomyopathy, microvascular disease in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, postmyocardial infarction cardiac remodeling, iron in heart failure, and cardio-oncology. While Prof Petrie has many research interests, he also takes pleasure in mentoring future high-caliber cardiologists and has supervised many outstanding individuals during their PhDs and MDs.

Marco Metra is Full Professor of Cardiology and Director of the Institute of Cardiology of the Civil Hospital and University of Brescia, Italy, and Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Heart Failure and Senior Consulting Editor of the European Heart Journal.

Prof Metra has been principal investigator and member of the Executive or Steering Committees of many trials in patients with heart failure. His research is focused on heart failure with, as main areas of interest, β-blocker therapy and, more recently, the assessment and treatment of the patients with acute heart failure.

He has co-chaired with Prof. Teerlink, San Francisco, CA, the phase IIB Pre-RELAX-AHF and the phase III RELAX-AHF randomized placebo controlled trials in patients with acute heart failure and is chairing the current RELAX-AHF-2 trial, which has as primary end-points the effects of serelaxin on the 180-days mortality and on in-hospital worsening heart…