Principal Investigator
Daniel Bernstein, M.D.
Alfred Woodley Salter and Mabel G. Salter Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology)
Associate Dean for Curriculum and Scholarship
Dr. Bernstein completed his undergraduate education at MIT and his MD at NYU. He did his pediatric residency at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, a Fellowship in Medical Education at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and then a fellowship in Pediatric Cardiology at the UCSF, under the mentorship of Dr. Abraham Rudolph. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1986, served as Chief of Pediatric Cardiology from 1994-2011 and as Director of the Children’s Heart Center at Packard Children’s Hospital from 2001-2011. In 2018 he was appointed Associate Dean for Curriculum and Scholarship at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he oversees medical student education and research.
Dr. Bernstein has directed an NIH- and AHA-funded basic science lab for over 35 years, focusing on how cell signaling regulates the balance between cardiotoxicity and cardioprotection. Together with Brian Kobilka, he was part of a team that created some of the first murine gene knockouts and he spent the next decade studying the role of β-adrenergic receptors in regulating cardiac function in health and disease. His more recent work applies the powerful tools of CRISPR gene editing and patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to study the mechanisms of heart disease, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and to enhance the power of pharmacogenomics to screen patients for susceptibility to drug toxicity. Dr. Bernstein has also been at the forefront of pediatric heart failure and transplantation since the infancy of both fields. He published the first proof that the transplanted heart grows as the child grows, one of the first descriptions of post-transplant tumors, and transplantation for children born with congenital heart disease. He has led several multi-center clinical trials in pediatric solid organ transplantation.
Research Staff
Giovanni Fajardo, M.D.
Research Associate
Dr. Fajardo completed his MD at Universidad El Bosque, Bogotá, Colombia. He did his Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University Pediatric Cardiology laboratory under Dr. Daniel Bernstein's supervision.
Dr. Fajardo was awarded the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship for his work on beta adrenergic receptor subtypes and signaling through MAPK and PKC in the pathogenesis of cardiomyopathy. After finishing his fellowship he continued working at the laboratory as a Research Associate.
He has worked on the differential cardiotoxic/cardioprotective effects of beta-adrenergic receptor subtypes in myocytes and fibroblasts in doxorubicin cardiomyopathy. He has studied the role of beta-2-adrenergic receptors in cardioprotection through crosstalk with mitochondrial cell death pathways and calcium signaling and the effects of these pathways in the development of cardiomyopathy in mice. Currently he is working on the characterization of the functional consequences of mitochondria heterogeneity in cardiomyocytes by real-time tracking of single cell mitochondrial function in large populations of cardiomyocytes and individual tracking of mitochondrial regions within a cell, allowing the study of heterogeneity at the single mitochondrion level.
