The Cardiac Electrophysiology Society is delighted to have Dr. W. Jonathan Lederer as the 18th Annual Gordon Moe Lecturer. Dr. Lederer is Professor and Director of the Medical Biotechnology Center, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He has Ph.D /M.D. degrees from Yale University (1975/1976) where he worked with Richard W. Tsien. Following an internship in Medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, (Robert Petersdorf, 1976-7), he was awarded a British-American Heart fellowship to study with Denis Noble (Oxford University, Oxford, England; 1977?1979). He was recruited by Mordecai P. Blaustein as an Assistant Professor of Physiology at the University of Maryland Baltimore in 1979, rising to Professor in 1988, a position he still holds. He was appointed Professor in the Medical Biotechnology Center in 1995 where he became Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Biophysics and assumed the position of Director in 1999.

Besides numerous special lectureships including the Peter Dressler Memorial Lectureship, Dalhousie University School of Medicine; National Lecturer Korean Physiological Society, Seoul, Korea. 1997; Wellcome Lecturers at Loyola University School of Medicine, Chicago (1995) and University of Mississippi School of Medicine, Jackson, MS (1999), D’Agrosa Lecturer, St. Louis University, St. Louis, MO, 2002 and the 9th Annual Fred Fay Lecture, University of Massachusetts, 2007, he has won the Cole Award from the Biophysical Society, 1998 and the Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, University System of Maryland, 1999. He is a founding fellow of the International Society for Heart Research and was elected a Fellow of the Biophysical Society in 2002. He has served on numerous editorial boards and grant review panels and held leadership positions in several academic societies. Dr. Lederer has been funded by both foundations and government sources, including an NIH Merit Award. He has published over 175 research articles. Dr. Lederer has mentored 8 predoctoral students and 27 post-doctoral fellows.

Dr. Lederer’s research focuses on calcium signaling in heart in both the normal and diseased state. He is co-discoverer of calcium sparks, a fundamental event in calcium signaling and cardiac contraction, which has led to the development of a new area of research in local signaling events. Earlier, with Richard Tsien at Yale, he discovered and characterized the transient inward current, a finding that contributed to our understanding of the arrhythmogenic delayed after-depolarization (DAD) and early after-depolarization (EAD) events. He has also pioneered the use of confocal imaging in cardiac research, developing a number of techniques and tools.

He maintains an active and well-funded laboratory studying the molecular basis of subcellular and cellular signaling in heart at high spatial and temporal resolutions. While the major areas of work center on excitation-contraction coupling and arrhythmogenesis, new areas of research interest include stem cells, mitochondrial signaling and cellular remodeling. Besides NIH and past AHA funding, Dr. Lederer is also part of an international consortium funded by the LeDucq Foundation to study the molecular and cellular basis of atrial fibrillation and novel approaches to treatment.