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The Florida Heart Research Foundation has announced Ariadna Herrera, PhD candidate at Florida International University (FIU), as its “Stop Heart Disease Early Career Researcher of the Year.”
Herrera will be presented with the prestigious award in the amount of $50,000 at this year’s annual meeting of the Florida Chapter of the American College of Cardiology which take place Aug. 9-11 at Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Orlando.
Herrera is a PhD candidate at FIU’s Biomedical Engineering Department, where she also received her bachelor’s degree. Having developed an interest in scientific research and tissue engineering, she had the opportunity to get involved in cardiovascular research as an undergraduate student through the Coulter Undergraduate Research Excellence program at FIU.
Her postgraduate efforts have focused on conducting regenerative cardiovascular engineering research and working as a teaching assistant, helping current undergraduate students excel in their coursework. She has served as a co-author on an original research article and has been issued a non-provisional patent on a promising decellularized biological scaffold for tissue engineering.
Congenital heart defects are one of the most common types of birth defects in the United States. These birth defects include ventricular, aortic, and valvular defects. In particular, malformations of the heart valves lead to improper blood flow through the heart.
Children born with valvular defects face a lifetime of stressful and burdensome re-operations as current treatment options (like prosthetic and bioprosthetic valves) do not grow along with the child. Researchers in the field have been sought to develop tissue engineered heart valves to serve as a solution to this problem. Ideally, these tissue engineered valves would fully integrate into the native tissue and develop with the child.
However, to appropriately engineer a heart valve the structure and biology of native valves must be understood in-depth.
Herrera’s PhD work focuses on investigating the structural properties and functionality of different biomaterials that are of interest for tissue engineering. She plans to use the funds from this award to further explore new materials that can be utilized for tissue engineering heart valves, such as nanofibrous scaffolds.
Mechanical testing will be performed to obtain important material properties. Hydrodynamic functionality also will be performed to assess how these scaffolds would behave under physiologically relevant flow. Ultimately, these obtained parameters will be compared to that of native valves to understand which materials are most compatible to function as a valve.
Each year, in collaboration with the Florida Chapter of the American College of Cardiology, Florida Heart Research Foundation recognizes the “Stop Heart Disease Early Career Researcher of the Year.” As of 2021, the now $50,000 grant is awarded to an “Early Career” investigator/researcher within the state of Florida whose research is felt to have had the broadest impact on the advancement of knowledge in the diagnosis, treatment and/or prevention of cardiovascular disease.
To be considered for the award, the researcher must be nominated by a colleague, conduct research within, and be a resident of, Florida, be active in the arena of clinical and/or basic cardiovascular research and MUST be an early career investigator.
The program was launched in 2003 to inspire and promote excellence in cardiovascular research in the state of Florida known as the “Stop Heart Disease” Researcher of the Year Award. Miami Heart Research Institute/Florida Heart Research Foundation has been very fortunate to have achieved a close collaboration with the Florida Chapter of the American College of Cardiology, an extremely important partnership in the fight against heart disease.
Previous awards have inspired important progress in the critical areas of recognition and treatment of cardiovascular disease in diabetics, as well as in the role of gene variants in the therapy for congestive heart failure. Ariadna Herrera joins this distinguished tradition with a clear vision of the role of research in improving people’s lives.
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