The SAHR Program Committee

Overview and Major goal of the SAHR scientific program committee:

The Asian Cardiovascular Symposium (ACS) is a half-day pre-meeting symposium of the Basic Cardiovascular Sciences (BCVS) scientific sessions. The ACS aims to promote the AHA mission and to facilitate outreach concerning the Asian Cardiovascular Science communities. It provides an opportunity for communication and collaboration among scientists and clinicians between American and Asian countries to extend the impact of BCVS internationally. The ACS will be hosted by four organizations, and the Society for South Asian Heart Research (SAHR) is one of them. The primary goal of the SAHR Scientific Program Committee (SAHR-SPC) is to help plan and ensure a rigorous, challenging, and enlightening annual ACS-SAHR scientific meeting that meets the needs of all disciplines involved in cardiovascular research, education, and practice.

The SAHR-SPC will usually consist of:

Program Chair:

The program chair ensures that a well-balanced, high-quality technical program is organized and presented at the annual ACS-SAHR. Together with the Vice-Chair and program committee members, he/she will be responsible for deciding on the theme and planning the program for the symposium. Furthermore, together with the Executive/Steering Committee, he/she will develop the conference’s call for papers/abstracts. He/She takes responsibility for the peer review process.

Vice-Chair:

The Vice-Chair will be responsible for arranging meetings with the Program Chair, preparing agendas, taking minutes, monitoring attendance, ensuring action points are communicated, and keeping a record of committee business.

Program committee members:

The program chair will appoint people to the program committee to help manage the peer review process. Program committee members will also take responsibility for distinct parts of the peer review process or thematic areas within the conference. Three to five members representing various members and possible meeting participants, including women and men, and junior and senior faculty will be included as SPC members.

Responsibilities of the SAHR scientific program committee:

  • Inviting the keynote speakers/presenters.

  • Evaluating the submitted abstracts from pre and postdocs and inviting for short/lightning presentation.

  • Obtaining titles, abstracts, biographical information, and equipment needs from the invited speakers/presenters.

  • Confirming their availability and willingness to present their work in the symposium.

  • Creating the program

    • Program Schedule with times

    • Abstracts of all talks (invited, students, and contributed)

    • Biographies of invited speakers

  • Providing the completed program to the Communications Committee Chair for publicity purposes

  • Providing the completed program to the Digital chair for the smooth flow of the presentation

  • Consolidating the results from the evaluation/judge committee members

  • Sending a note of thanks to all invited speakers and presenters after the meeting.

SAHR Scientific Program Committee 2023-2025

Program Committee Chair: Shyam S Bansal, Ph.D.

Brief Bio: I am the Vice-Chair for Basic Research, Heart and Vascular Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology College of Medicine (PSCOM), Hershey. My research endeavors involve a comprehensive analysis of dysregulated innate and adaptive immune networks and their role in mediating the pathophysiology of myocardial infarction (MI) and chronic heart failure (HF), a deadly disease with 50% mortality within 5 years. I am particularly interested in deciphering the role of T-cell subsets and time-dependent phenotypic changes that these cells undergo during chronic HF.

As an extension, I am also interested in identifying and developing novel strategies to reverse pathological changes in immune cells for their bench-to-bed transition. We recently identified a new drug molecule that can stop disease progression in HF, the first drug to be able to do so, and can improve the lives of millions of HF patients. Due to the widespread impact of this work on HF patients, our research was recently featured in the ‘TIME’ Magazine and my research is heavily funded by the NIH. My training in pharmacy, pharmaceutics, pharmacology & and toxicology equip me with unique perspectives to study heart failure and devise mechanism-based immune-therapeutic strategies capable of clinical translation.

Program Committee Vice-Chair: Padmini Sirish, Ph.D.

Brief Bio: Dr. Sirish an Adjunct Associate Professor in the UC Davis Department of Internal Medicine, Cardiology and her research focuses on understanding the impact of inflammation on cardiovascular disease (CVD). Her lab works on developing novel therapies for treating CVD, including end-stage heart failure through cardiac regeneration, and seeking new therapeutic targets in the inflammatory pathways for other CVD including atrial fibrillation. They have demonstrated the beneficial effects of novel compounds as strong anti-inflammatory and anti-arrhythmic agents in cardiac stem cell-therapy. Her lab has utilized animal models to provide mechanistic insights into atrial fibrillation, which represents a paradigm shift from conventional antiarrhythmic drugs that block downstream events, to a novel upstream therapeutic target by counteracting the inflammatory processes in atrial fibrillation.

Program Committee Members

SAHR Programming Committee is looking to recruit new motivated and self-driven members to help with SAHR programming for symposiums. Currently, we have openings for two faculty members (all levels) and one post-doctoral trainee member. Selected members will serve for two years. If you are interested in becoming a part of this committee and helping grow SAHR, please send us (info@southasianheart.org) your updated CV and a letter of intention (an email from your official email account will suffice) by Friday, Jan 24th, 2025.

Immediate Past Chair: Shanmughapriya Santhanam, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University, College of Medicine (PSCOM)

Pas Chair: Rajasekaran Namakkal Soorappan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular & Cellular Pathology, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Trainee Members:

  • Divya Sridharan, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher, The Ohio State University, Wexner Medical Center

  • Harikrishnan Venugopal, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York