D. Brian Foster Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Cardiology
Director, Laboratory of Cardiovascular Biochemistry
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
dbrianfoster@jhmi.edu
Brian hails from Canada, born in Québec City, Québec (Oui, c’est vrai!). He graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. There, he studied both smooth muscle and cardiac muscle contractile proteins, caldesmon and troponin I respectively, in the Laboratory of Dr. Jennifer Van Eyk. He moved to Boston where he received an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship to examine the conformation of these proteins on thin filaments by electron microscopy and 3D image reconstruction, under mentors Dr. William Lehman of the Boston University School of Medicine and Dr. Albert Wang, formerly of the Boston Biomedical Research Institute. Brian came to The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Division of Cardiology to apply his training in biochemistry to some of the big issues in heart disease under mentors Dr. Eduardo Marbán and Dr. Brian O’Rourke.
Brian heads the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Biochemistry that employs a systems biology approach that encompasses the tools of proteomics, metabolomics, and molecular cardiology to investigate the mechanisms underlying heart failure progression.