Dr Julia Gorelik

Julia Gorelik is Reader in Cellular Biophysics, within the Cardiovascular Science Division at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.

She is working in the interface between biophysics and cardiovascular Research. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from St-Petersburg's Institute of Cytology, Russian Academy of Science in 1996. She spent 7 years working with Professor Yuri Korchev (Imperial College, Hammersmith Campus) who was the first to develop a new high resolution microscopic technique that is suitable for studying living cells - Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy (SICM).

Dr Gorelik has a long-standing interest in the heart, which led her to develop the SICM to measure contraction, rhythm and calcium dynamics of cardiomyocytes simultaneously, allowing the study arrhythmias and heart failure conditions on cultured heart cells. She built a SICM microscope at Brompton Campus and combined it with fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) technique for study spatial distribution of beta-adrenoreceptors on the surface of the cardiomyocytes. Dr Gorelik is a scientist with an extensive network of collaborators.

Finally, in 2010, Dr Gorelik was awarded an Imperial College Research Excellence Award to study 'New Nanoscale Technique to Study cAMP/cGMP Localisation in Cardiovascular Tissue'.