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One of our experts on heart disease is the first external faculty member of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.

ARC Future Fellow Professor Livia Hool in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, has been appointed the prestigious Institute's first Faculty-at-Large.

"My appointment is to enhance collaboration between the Institute and research academics in WA," said Professor Hool, whose work in the field of cardiac electrophysiology looks at various mechanisms that lead to heart failure.

It is not the first time she has brought valuable connections to UWA. When Professor Hool, originally from Sydney, was awarded a NHMRC Peter Doherty Fellowship for early career researchers soon after completing a post-doctoral position at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, she decided to bring her funding to UWA in 1998 where she had the opportunity of setting up her own laboratory.

She is still an employee of UWA but the new position means that her research can be enriched by her colleagues and the extensive resources of the Victor Chang and that, conversely, her expertise is more readily available to the Institute.

"When I returned to Sydney from my postdoc, I worked for six months at the Victor Chang, before deciding to come to UWA," Professor Hool said. "And Professor Robert Graham, who was appointed the first Executive Director of the Institute in 1994, had also worked at the Cleveland Clinic, which is associated with Case Western Reserve University.  So I already had a small connection.

"Several years ago, I invited Professor Graham to UWA and we have kept in touch. Recently he contacted me because he was keen to develop a more formal link with the University."

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is the premier organisation in Australia for studying heart disease.  It was established in 1994, in honour of brilliant cardiac surgeon and researcher Victor Chang who pioneered the heart transplant program at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital.

Dr Chang was gunned down in the street in 1991, at the age of 54, in a failed extortion attempt against him.

Already, one of Professor Hool's PhD scholars, Padmapriya Muralidharan, is involved in a collaboration with the Institute in her research into the effects of oxidative stress on the L-type calcium channel in the heart.

The Faculty-at-Large position is for five years, with an option to renew it.