ProfessorSian Harding

Sian Harding is Emeritus Professor of Cardiac Pharmacology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, She was Head of the National Heart and Lung Institute Cardiovascular Division as well as Cardiovascular Lead for the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. Sian has been the department lead for the Athena Swan programme, which aims to support and transform gender equality within higher education and research.

She obtained her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from King's College, London in 1981, and since then the primary focus of her work was cardiomyocyte function in the failing heart. This has extended to gene therapy to modulate cardiomyocyte function, and she was Scientific PI for the UK's first clinical trial on myocardial gene therapy. More recently the scope extended to the characterisation of cardiomyocytes derived from pluripotent stem cells, and their use in cardiac repair, tissue engineering and drug discovery.

Professor Harding is Past-President of the European Section of the International Society for Heart Research She was on the Board of the British Society for Gene and Cell Therapy and has been elected as a Fellow to the British Pharmacological Society, the American Heart Association, and the European Society of Cardiology. She was Special Advisor to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on Regenerative Medicine and was a member of the CGT Catapult: Pluripotent stem cells programme Advisory Panel.

Sian is an expert on Broken Heart Syndrome, and its special relevance to post-menopausal women. She was part of the Women's Health Strategy for England Cardiovascular disease (CVD) roundtable and has written more on women’s cardiovascular health in her book “The Exquisite Machine”.