ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Forum Kamdar, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist interested in elucidating mechanisms of neuromuscular cardiomyopathy. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota in the Lillehei Heart Institute. During her cardiovascular disease fellowship in the Physician-Scientist Pathway she developed a model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy cardiomyopathy using patient-derived human induced pluripotent stem cells and identified an arrhythmic phenotype that is rescued with beta-adrenergic blockade. She is the recipient of the American Heart Association Young Investigator Award and American College of Cardiology Young Investigator Award. She also co-founded an interdisciplinary Neuromuscular Cardiomyopathy Clinic at the University of Minnesota and was awarded an International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation Grant to study heart transplant outcomes in patients with neuromuscular disease.
Dr. Kamdar’s research is funded by a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award. Her laboratory investigates molecular and physiological mechanisms of advanced heart failure in neuromuscular cardiomyopathy, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, using a bench-to-bedside approach leveraging patient derived human induced pluripotent stem cell cardiomyocytes, human heart tissues, and patient data with the ultimate goal of developing new therapies to benefit patients with neuromuscular cardiomyopathies.