The Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Computational Medicine is pleased to announce that two new faculty, Dr. Natalia Trayanova and Dr. Rachel Karchin, will be joining us in the next several months.

Natalia Trayanova, Ph.D. who is currently a Professor at Tulane University in the Department of Biomedical Engineering as well as the Director of the Computational Cardiac Electrophysiology Laboratory, will be joining the Institute in August, 2006 as a Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Trayanova is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of computational cardiac electrophysiology and research projects in her lab include arrhythmogenesis under the conditions of ischemia, mechano-electric feedback in the heart, mechanisms of ventricular defibrillation, the role of fibroblasts in conduction and defibrillation and arrhythmia induction due to electroporation caused by strong shocks in the heart.

Dr. Trayanova has over 100 peer-reviewed journal publications, book chapters and proceeding publications; was Elected Vice Chair for the 2007 and Chair for the 2008 Gordon Conference on Cardiac Arrhythmia Mechanisms; was an associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering; was appointed to the Editorial Board of the journal Heart Rhythm; received the Tulane University Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship in 2005; was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2003; and was a Distinguished Fulbright Research Fellow at Oxford University.

Rachel Karchin, Ph.D., currently a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences, will be joining the Institute in October 2006 as an Assistant Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Karchin’s current research is focused on the problem of understanding and predicting the effect of point mutations on protein structure and function. Such information will provide insights into the functional mechanisms of proteins as well as their role in human disease and variation in drug response.

Dr. Karchin is a member of the International Society for Computational Biology and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.