2023 Cardiac Physiome Workshop; Irvine, California; 24-26 April 2023

This grant provides support for students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career scientists to attend the 2023 Cardiac Physiome Workshop, which will be held in Irvine, CA 24-26 April 2023. The workshop will be organized by faculty and staff at the University of California, Irvine, and will be co-hosted with Edwards Lifesciences at their international headquarters in Irvine, CA.

This award will help broaden participation by providing registration and travel supplements to early career scientists who are traditionally underrepresented in STEM and new to the Cardiac Physiome community. The individuals supported will attend the conference and present a poster or oral presentation. These individuals will benefit from the technical experience and professional networking in both formal and informal settings at the conference.

Funding is mainly to support scientists from underrepresented groups, first time attendees, those without any available funding, and those with outstanding abstracts. The goal of the workshop is to identify current limitations in cardiovascular healthcare and the innovations needed via computational modeling.

The Cardiac Physiome, a subgroup formed out of the larger Physiome project, is an international collaborative effort towards establishing biophysical models of human physiology. The Cardiac Physiome Workshop takes place every 1-2-years, with this year being the first in-person meeting in the United States since the SARS-CoV2 pandemic. The 2023 Cardiac Physiome workshop will bring together computational and experimental scientists, engineers, clinicians, and industry partners to discuss the progress and future of in-silico cardiovascular medicine across a three and a half day meeting.

The conference will include four plenary speakers across these themes, discussion sessions surrounding health disparities and sex-differences. The workshop is a single-track session of talks, posters, and discussions that encourages new collaborations and conversations across 150 participants, a majority of which are early career scientists. The 2023 subthemes include (a) addressing health disparities through data collection and model simulation, (b) identifying mechanobiological sex-differences in cardiovascular phenomena, (c) methodologies for cardiovascular digital twins, and (d) innovations in multiscale computational models of cardiovascular function.

This conference is supported by the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology (BMMB) program in the CMMI division and the Engineering of Biomedical Systems (EBMS) program in the CBET division.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.