Miriam Cortese-krott PhD

Dr. Miriam Cortese-Krott is currently the Head and Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Cardiology, Pneumology, and Angiology at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf. Dr. Cortese-Krott received a Doctoral Degree (Laurea) with honors in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Milan, working on transgenic mice models of atherosclerosis. She obtained her Ph.D. with honors (Summa cum Laude) in Pharmacology at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf and worked on iNOS-dependent zinc signaling and gene expression regulation. During her post-doctoral training, she focused on the isolation and characterization of eNOS in red blood cells. She has a long-standing interest in the role of nitric oxide and sulfide in the pathophysiology of vascular disease and hypertension. To study the role of red blood cells as fundamental metabolic and inter-organ communication systems she created tissue-specific eNOS KO and KI mice. She won a number of young investigator awards from the European Nitric Oxide Society, the Society of Free Radical Research International, the Society for Redox Biology and Medicine, and the Oxygen Club of California, and most recently she received the Edens-Preis-2017 for Excellence in Science of the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf. She published a number of papers, contributed to two chapters of the last edition of the Nitric Oxide Book (edited by Louis Ignarro and Bruce Freeman), and serves as an editor of three journals. She has received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), including the priority program SPP1710 and the IRTG 1902. Her motto is “gutta caveat lapidem” and her main priority is the education of promotion of young researchers in their scientific careers.