Peter Kohl (Founding Director of the Institute for Experimental Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Freiburg)

The heart contains more non-myocytes than cardiomyocytes. With few exceptions, these non-myocytes are electrically non-excitable, and they have long been assumed to matter for cardiac electrophysiology only as electrical insulators. This is not the whole picture, though, as will be illustrated on examples including unexpected contributions of cardiac fibroblasts and macrophages to myocardial function in healthy and lesioned tissue. 

Peter Kohl is the Founding Director of the Institute for Experimental Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Freiburg (an English language research institute bridging natural sciences, engineering, computing, and medicine), the Scientific Director of the University Heart Centre Freiburg / Bad Krozingen (with more than 1,500 staff and 24,000 hospitalisations p.a. the largest such centre at German university hospitals), and a Visiting Professor at Oxford University and Imperial College London. 

Before moving to Freiburg, Peter served as inaugural Chair in Cardiac Biophysics and Systems Biology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London. Prior to that, he spent nearly two decades at Oxford, progressing from post-doctoral research fellow with Denis Noble, to junior group leader, lecturer and reader, holding various grants from the British Heart foundation, UK Research Councils, and the Royal Society, as well as an advanced grant from the European Research Council.

His interests lie in cardiac structure-function studies, including both myocytes and non-myocytes (structure), as well as bi-directional electro-mechanical cross-talk (function), which he explores using a mix of experimental and computational techniques.