Marlene Rabinovitch, MD
Dwight and Vera Dunlevie Professor of Pediatrics, Cardiology

Director, Basic Science and Engineering (BASE) Initiative,
Betty Irene Moore Children's Heart Center

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Dr. Rabinovitch joined Stanford University School of Medicine Faculty in the summer of 2002 as the Dwight and Vera Dunlevie Professor of Pediatric Cardiology, and Scientist at the Vera Moulton Wall Center for Pulmonary Vascular Disease. In 2018, she became the Director of the Basic Science and Engineering (BASE) Initiative in Stanford Children's Health of the Betty Irene Moore Children's Heart Center. She is also the Associated Director in Basic Research at Stanford’s Cardiovascular Institute. From 2002-2013, she was appointed as Professor (by courtesy) of Developmental Biology. Dr. Rabinovitch is a graduate of McGill University Medical School and completed her pediatrics training at the University of Colorado and sub-specialty training in cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She was Assistant Professor at Harvard and then moved back to Canada where she became Associate and later Professor of Pediatrics, Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology and of Medicine at the University of Toronto, Hospital for Sick Children.  There, she was the Director of Cardiovascular Research and held the Robert M. Freedom/Heart and Stroke Foundation Chair.

Dr. Rabinovitch has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring over the years, the most recent being in 2017 from the American Heart Association, the Distinguished Scientist Lecturer at the Scientific Sessions. In 2016, she was named the J. Burns Amberson Lecturer at the ATS International Conference in San Francisco.  ATS also gave her the Robert F Grover Prize for the Assembly on Pulmonary Circulation.  In 2015, she was presented with the Mentor Award for Excellence from the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. In 2012, she received the Judtih Pool Award from the Northern California Chapter of the Association for Women in Science. In 2010, she received the Louis and Artur Lucian Award for Research in Circulatory Diseases from McGill University.  Then, the American Thoracic Society Recognition Award for Scientific Accomplishment in 2008. She is the recipient of the 2006 American Heart Association Distinguished Scientist Award, and in 2005 she was the American Heart Association Dickinson Richards Lecturer. Previous awards include the 2004 Canadian Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health (ICRH) Distinguished Lecture and Prize in Cardiovascular Sciences; the 2004 AHA Basic Research Prize; the University of Kentucky Gill Heart Institute Award for Outstanding Contributions to Cardiovascular Research (2003); the AHA Paul Dudley White International Lectureship (2002); a Research Achievement Award from the Canadian Cardiovascular Society (1994); the Julius Comroe Lectureship from the American Physiological Society (1996), an Endowed Research Chair from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario (1997); the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada Award of Merit (1999); the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2000), and the McGill University Cushing Memorial Award in Pediatrics (1971). She has given numerous named lectureships in North America and served as a Visiting Professor in many countries in Europe, the UK, Australia and Asia. She has more than 185 peer-reviewed publications and 120+ invited reviews, articles, and book chapters. 

Dr. Rabinovitch completed a five-year term in 2016 on the External Advisory Board of the NHLBI Lung Repair and Regeneration Consortium (LRRC), and also she completed a four-year term on the NIH/NHLBI Scientific Advisory Council in 2011. She is currently on the Executive Committee of the Pulmonary Vascular Research Institute and has served on the Executive Council of the American Pediatric Society and Scientific Advisory Boards of the Pulmonary Hypertension Association, the MPI for Heart and Lung Research Board of the Max Planck Society, the Children’s Discovery Institute of Washington University, the Doris Duke and Burroughs Wellcome Foundations, and numerous NIH Training Grants. She is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation in addition to the Association of American Physicians, and has been Associate Editor of Circulation Research and the Annual Reviews of Physiology. The main focus of her research program is on uncovering molecular pathways that lead to developmental and inflammatory mechanisms of vascular pathobiology, particularly pulmonary hypertension.  

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Michal Bental Roof, PhD
Academic and Research Program Officer, Rabinovitch Lab and BASE

(650) 724-9589 — Office Phone
(650) 723-6700 — Fax
email Michal

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Dr. Michal Bental Roof joined our group as an Academic and Research Program Officer in 2002. She oversees grant proposal development, manuscript preparation, regulatory compliance and reporting internally (IRB, APLAC, biosafety) and externally (FDA, NIH).  She coordinates the translational program headed by Drs. Rabinovitch and Zamanian in collaboration with Proteo to develop Elafin as a PAH therapy, and with our Clinical Research Coordinator, oversees the activities of the Stanford Transplant Tissue Bank.  Dr. Roof supports our BASE faculty in special projects and with internal and external regulatory issues.

Dr. Roof received her BSc in Chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and MSc and PhD in the Life Sciences from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Her doctoral work studied the response of a unicellular alga to osmotic shock, developing a setup to follow living cells in real time using NMR spectroscopy.  Following postdoctoral research with Dr. Carol Deutsch at the University of Pennsylvania, investigating T-cell activation using real time NMR spectroscopy, she was Scientific Development Administrator of Penn’s Institute for Medicine and Engineering, and completed a business management certificate program at the Wharton Business School.  Previous Stanford responsibilities included coordinating the Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Science Concentration and the MED223 class (from inception in 2005 to 2015), coordination of the Stanford K12 Program in "Omics of Lung Disease" and the CVI T32 training grant "Mechanisms and Innovation in Vascular Disease”.

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Lingli Wang, MD
Basic Life Research Scientist
Lab Manager

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Dr. Lingli Wang joined Dr. Rabinovitch’s group in July 2003 as lab manager, bringing over 10 years of experience in life science research to the group. Dr. Wang manages the transgenic mouse lines produced and used in the different research projects. With Dr. Cao, she trains new postdoctoral fellows and laboratory staff, and manages the day to day operations of the lab. In addition to managing the lab, Dr. Wang also investigates the cardiovascular phenotype in mice with tissue specific deletion of BMPRII. She found that loss of Bmpr2 in pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells (PASMC) causes congenital heart diseases in mice. The penetrance is about 50%, and the survivors developed pulmonary hypertension (PH) in a mouse model of reoxygenation after chronic hypoxia. She found that loss of Bmpr2 in PASMC leads to reduced contractility and heightened proliferation, caused by elevated SMAD2/3 and ARRB2 and consequent increase in pAKT mediated activation of β-Catenin and reduction in RHOA/RAC1.

Dr. Wang received her MD degree from the Fourth Army Medical University in Xi'an, China. She completed her postdoctoral studies at Stanford's Dept. of Pediatrics in 1997, where she investigated the mechanism of interferon resistance in rotavirus. Prior to Stanford, she worked at the University of Southern California, School of Medicine.  Following her postdoctoral studies, Dr. Wang worked in Stanford's Dept. of Pediatrics Hematology and Oncology Division, investigating multi-drug resistance, and found a novel inhibitor of apoptosis, ARMER; and in the Dept. of Pathology, where she investigated markers for human kidney tumors using cDNA and tissue microarrays and computer-assisted data analysis.

Lingli's project

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Kamakshi Dattatray Bichu
Life Science Research Professional 1

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Kamakshi earned her MS from Duke University in December 2023, where she conducted her research under the guidance of Dr. Dmitry Velmeshev. Her research focused on designing and fabricating 3D-printed scaffolds optimized for neuronal stem cell growth. Her work included differentiating iPSCs into neural stem cells and fostering organoid formation. She experimented with various bioink formulations and adhesion molecules, refining scaffold compatibility to support organoid development.

In May 2024, Kamakshi joined the Rabinovitch lab, where her research explores why some BMPR2 mutation carriers are protected from pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) despite carrying a mutation associated with the disease. By using metabolic labeling techniques, she aims to identify the regulatory mechanisms that may protect these unaffected carriers. Understanding these mechanisms could shed light on why similar regulatory pathways might be absent or altered in familial PAH patients, ultimately leading to disease onset.

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Yuxi Zhang
Basic Life Science Research Professional 1

Starting Sept 2025

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Pending

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Mir Adil, PharmD, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow

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Dr. Adil received his PharmD from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad, India and worked as a Clinical Pharmacologist and Medical Writer for three years before pursuing his PhD in Clinical & Experimental Therapeutics from University of Georgia, USA in the laboratory of Dr. Somansth Shenoy. During his PhD, he investigated the role of a tight junction gene 'CLDN17' in vascular permeability leading to lung and kidney injuries. Dr. Adil joined the Rabinovitch Laboratory in January 2022 as a Postdoctoral Scholar and his research focusses on uncovering the mechanism leading to the abnormal increase in the expression of human endogenous retroviruses in myeloid cells.  He is specifically relating this sustained innate immune response to loss of BMPR2 mediated control of the lnc RNA Xist that is important in X chromosome inactivation. Dr. Adil is applying multi-omic approaches to the study of human monocytes and induced pluripotent stem cells differentiated to monocytes, monocyte derived dendritic cells and macrophages from patients with genetic causes of progressive pulmonary arterial hypertension as these cells are implicated in the chronic inflammatory response that causes progressive disease. Dr. Adil is also working on developing a biomarker assay (for a phase II clinical trial) to determine the efficacy of a recombinant endogenous neutrophil elastase inhibitor (elafin) in patients suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension and in identifying interactors of elafin that suppress the abnormal formation of neutrophil extracellular traps.

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Chongyang Zhang, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow

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Dr. Zhang received her BS/MS in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the University of Buffalo, New York, and her PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of Rochester, New York.  During her PhD research in the laboratory of Dr. Chen Yan she investigated the role of a cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase 1C (PDE1C) in the phenotype change of smooth muscle cells and abdominal aortic aneurysm.  She also studied the pharmacological effects of various PDE inhibitors in the regulation of aortic aneurysm progression.  Dr. Zhang’s current research focuses on flow mediated regulation of ALDH3A1, and how this enzyme coordinates endothelial cell metabolism, chromatin remodeling and gene expression.  A second project determines the  role of SOX17 in causing severe pulmonary arterial hypertension when there is a congenital heart defect with high shear stress.

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Xin Zhou, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Joint with Mike Snyder's Lab, Genetics

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Dr. Zhou received his BS in Biological Science from Fudan University in Shanghai, China and his PhD in Genetics and Genome Sciences from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, Connecticut with.  Xin’s early research focused on the utilization of herbal natural products of potential medically-related application and characterization of bioactive components from medicinal mushrooms. During his predoctoral training at Case Western and PhD thesis research at The Jackson Lab, Dr. Zhou participated in several projects focused on understanding the basics of the host immune response to virus, and developed a novel drug delivery system for viral infection, which could be applied to anti-viral small molecules. He also participated the Human Microbiome Project, where he specifically validated the interaction of microbes and IL17 producing cells and their relationship with insulin sensitivity. Dr. Zhou joined the Snyder and Rabinovitch labs at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow in 2019, where he carries out bioinformatics/biostatistical analysis of host-microbiome interactions in diseases such as type 2 diabetes and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). In the Rabinovitch lab, he studies the monocyte and dendritic cell subsets in PAH and how the transcriptome and CYTOF can influence their interaction with vascular and other inflammatory cells.

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Isabel Blanco, MD
Visiting Scholar

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Coming Soon

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