Dr. Peter Molenaar is an Honorary Professor in the Northside
Clinical School of Medicine at The University of Queensland, based at The
Prince Charles Hospital. He is head of the in vitro human heart laboratory and
co-head of the Cardio-vascular Molecular & Therapeutics Translational
Research Group together with heart failure and electrophysiology researchers
and clinicians. Dr. Molenaar was a registered pharmacist until recently with B
Pharm and M Pharm degrees from the Victorian College of Pharmacy (now MIPS).
His M Pharm, by research, was with Errol Malta and Colin Raper at the Victorian
College of Pharmacy. His PhD was with Roger Summers in the Dept of
Pharmacology, University of Melbourne. He carried out post-doctoral work with
Anthony Davenport and Alberto Kaumann in the Clinical Pharmacology Unit at
Addenbrooke’s Hospital, University of Cambridge. He held positions as an NHMRC
RD Wright Fellow, Research Fellow, and Senior Research Fellow before taking up
an academic position at QUT, which he held until 2024. His research has studied
G-protein coupled receptor mechanisms in the human heart, focusing mostly on
β-adrenoceptor signaling mechanisms.
Dr. Halina Dobrzynski obtained her B.Sc. in Biological Sciences (Physiology) in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (Cellular Cardiology) in 2000. Both degrees were obtained from the University of Leeds, UK. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Leeds for five years. In 2005, she moved to the University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Cardiac Anatomy and Pathophysiology. Since August 2011, she has been a Senior Lecturer in Cardiovascular Sciences at the School of Medicine, University of Manchester. Her main focus is the macro- and micro-anatomy and molecular biology of the specialized electrical system of the heart (the cardiac conduction system) in health, aging, and disease in humans and many small lab species, as well as larger animals such as goats, cats, and camels. Since 2019 she has also been affiliated with the Department of Anatomy, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland, and has a visiting professor post. She obtained a D.Sc. in Biomedical and Health Sciences in 2023 from Jagiellonian University.
