Sonnet Jonker PhD

Dr. Sonnet Jonker is an associate professor in Cardiovascular Medicine at the OHSU School of Medicine and is a scientist focused on perinatal cardiovascular development. She worked in the lab to understand how the prenatal environment determines the structure and function of the heart at birth, and how that might affect cardiovascular health for life. She is particularly interested in what signals control how the heart decides how many cardiomyocytes - the muscle cells that perform the pumping work of the heart - grow when the fetus faces challenges before birth.

She is also interested in determining how cardiomyocyte growth interacts with coronary vascular growth because the coronary vascular disease is a significant cause of death and disability in adulthood. She believes that if we learn how heart growth is regulated in the perinatal period, we can design therapies to help babies grow stronger hearts. This could benefit individuals born prematurely, with intrauterine growth restriction, with intrauterine challenges such as anemia, and those with congenital heart disease. Dr. Jonker joined OHSU in 2009 after completing her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Iowa.