Faculty Directory

Biography

Dr. Ilanit Itzhaki is a stem cell cardiac electrophysiology researcher. She completed her Master’s degree in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, where she studied the effect of non-excitatory electrical stimulation on cardiac mechanics. She continued on to receive her Ph.D. degree in the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. Her thesis work focused on demonstrating the ability of disease- and patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology to model the phenotype presented by long QT syndrome and CPVT patients at bedside as a measurable electrophysiological signature at the cellular level in the dish at bench side, highlighting the potential of human iPSCs in the field of personalized medicine. Dr. Itzhaki conducted her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Leveraging on her stem cell electrophysiology expertise, she turned to the field of sex differences and sex hormones, interrogating the effect of the female hormone estrogen on cardiac arrhythmic propensity.

Research

At Emory, Dr. Itzhaki and her team will focus on age- and sex-differences with respect to sex hormones in cardiovascular health and disease. The lab will specifically focus on sex hormones’ impact on the initiation and termination of cardiac arrhythmias, with the intent of contributing to the development of drug screening platforms, the derivation of new antiarrhythmic therapeutic options, and clinical risk stratification for the management of female and male pediatric and adult long QT syndrome patients, specifically, and arrhythmia-susceptible congenital disease patients, in general.

Thus, the lab’s main expertise and research interests are:

Cardiac electrophysiology (patch clamp, high throughput technologies, etc.), calcium handling, iPSC technology application for the study of arrhythmia-susceptible congenital diseases (with a focus on the long QT syndrome), and sex hormones and sex-differences in cardiovascular health and disease.

Education

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford University, School of Medicine

PhD, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine 
Master’s, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering
Bachelor, Bar Ilan University

Research Center(s)

• Children’s Heart Research and Outcomes Center (HeRO) →