Dr. Bina Joe, professor of physiology and pharmacology and director of the Center for Hypertension and Personalized Medicine at The University of Toledo, has been named the 2014 Lewis K. Dahl Memorial Lecturer by the American Heart Association’s Council on Hypertension.
Joe
“I feel proud to march on, leading my research team in our University’s Center for Hypertension and Personalized Medicine. The dedication and hard work of our trainees make faculty members like me stand tall amidst stalwarts in the field.”
She added, “I am greatly indebted to my researcher husband, Dr. Venkatesha Basrur, who is a faculty member of the University of Michigan, for his unstinted support and encouragement.”
Established in 1988 by the Council for High Blood Pressure Research (now referred to as the Council on Hypertension), the Lewis K. Dahl Memorial Lecture honors his groundbreaking work, which examined the relationship among salt, the kidney and hypertension, and the development of his genetically based experimental model of hypertension.
Each year, a prominent member from the hypertension field presents the Dahl Lecture at the High Blood Pressure Research Scientific Sessions, a conference held by the American Heart Association.
“To me, this represents one more milestone in a lifetime of scientific expedition with my peers,” Joe said. “This honor truly is an endorsement that motivates one a great deal to scale new heights in research.”
Joe will attend the conference in San Francisco in September and present the work she conducted using a specific hypertensive strain of rat, known as the Dahl rat, the strain developed by Dahl himself.
“This award coming home to Toledo while we are celebrating the golden anniversary of the Medical College of Ohio is personally quite exciting for me because it was not long after the birth of the Medical College of Ohio that the Dahl rats called Toledo home and since the 1970s have provided some of the most interesting insights into the world of how genes contribute to the inheritance of hypertension,” Joe said. “By the way, our research, which is in its 37th year of funding, is also one of the longest continually funded federal research programs at the University.”
Joe has published more than 60 journal articles, and in addition to this lectureship, she was recognized with the Young Scholars Award from the American Society of Hypertension in 2010.
“I am the mom of a college-bound son and a fourth-grade daughter, a biomedical researcher during the week, and a classical Indian dance teacher over the weekend,” Joe said. “Women in science can do it all indeed.”
