Ramona Emig

Research/Areas of Interest

Driven by multiple confounders like obesity, diabetes and hypertension heart failure is the leading cause of death in the Western world and its prevalence is predicted to increase even further in future. The aim of my postdoc in the Alcaide lab is to improve our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. In the past years, the Alcaide lab has established a crucial role for T cells in different models of heart failure and the importance of interstitial cells, such as fibroblasts, for immunomodulation. My own previous work focused on mechanosensation in fibroblasts and suggests that immune modulatory functions of fibroblasts can be affected by mechanosensing. Together, we aim to explore how mechanical remodeling of the heart occurring in heart failure tunes the interactions between fibroblasts and T cells in the context of cardiometabolic heart failure.