Dr Melissa Reichelt

Dr Reichelt is a tenured teaching and research academic in The University of Queensland’s School of Biomedical Sciences. She completed her PhD in cardiovascular Physiology at Griffith University, and held postdoctoral positions at The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (VCCRI) in Sydney, the University of California, San Diego (USA) and was a NHMRC Peter Doherty Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Dr Reichelt is currently funded by two Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grants and lead a 2019 Major Equipment Infrastructure Grant for a preclinical ultrasound machine (Vevo 3100) which measures cardiac function in animals as small as embryos in utero.

Dr Reichelt investigated the most important receptors governing cardiac function (adenosinergic, adrenergic, angiotensin, growth factor, mineralocorticoid, SGLT2), and the influence of ageing, diabetes, hypertension, exercise, influenza and sepsis on cardiovascular physiology. This work has been published in leading cardiovascular journals including Circulation Research, Basic Research in Cardiology, Cardiovascular Research, Hypertension and broader or other specialist journals such as Autophagy, Antioxidant and Redox Signalling, Journal of Infectious Disease and Scientific Reports. Dr Reichelt’s research has most recently been augmented by in-house design and production of viruses that control the expression of receptors and their ligands. She remains fascinated by what the heart can accomplish; filling with and ejecting blood every second (or so) of every day and night, year after year, while retaining the capacity to more than treble cardiac output during exercise. It’s an incredible feat of engineering and only gets more and more interesting the more I learn about it.