Gabriela Villalpando Torres

Gabby is interested in the disease Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a heart disease that leads to increased thickening of the ventricular walls and enhanced contractility of the heart. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how the non-contractile cytoskeleton of heart muscle cells, composed primarily of microtubules and desmin, undergoes remodeling in the presence of disease. Her project aims to understand these relationships by mechanically challenging healthy and diseased cardiomyocytes with inotropic drugs and culture in fibrotic-like conditions and tracking the resulting remodeling response. She hope that her project will explain the relationship between HCM associated mutations, remodeling in the non-contractile cytoskeleton, and how this remodeling response affects the overall functionality of a cardiomyocyte. She hopes to augment her training through DDB so that she can quantify this functionality using data science methods.