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Invited speakers

The 2025 ASCEPT and Hypertension Australia Joint Scientific Meeting features an exceptional lineup of international and national experts at the forefront of pharmacology, toxicology, and hypertension research and clinical practice.

This meeting presents a unique opportunity to engage with experts who are shaping the future of pharmacological interventions, toxicology research, and hypertension management across Australasia and beyond.

Speakers are listed in order of presentation time. More speakers will be announced over the coming weeks.

Prof Jeanette Woolard Isaac

BPS Lecturer
Wednesday 10 December

Prof Jeanette Woolard Isaac

Prof Woolard Isaac leads one of the few laboratories in the world capable of monitoring complex cardiovascular responses in conscious animals. Her in vivo laboratory is internationally recognised for its unique capability to measure regional blood flow across three distinct vascular beds in conscious subjects. This expertise has enabled her to secure major external research grants and foster impactful collaborations with industry partners including AstraZeneca, Promega, Heptares, and Medicines Discovery Catapult. She has also established major international research collaborations with teams across Europe, the USA, and Australia. She is a co-applicant on a £2 million MRC programme grant and serves as Principal Investigator on a recently awarded £4.5 million Wellcome Trust four-year PhD programme in Drug Discovery and Team Science. Additionally, she is the Nottingham lead on a €3.8 million European Commission-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions ITN INSPIRE project (INnovation in Safety Pharmacology for Integrated cardiovascular safety assessment to REduce adverse events and late-stage drug attrition). Since January 2021, she has served as the Nottingham Director of the £10 million Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE), following her role as Deputy Director since the Centre’s inception. In 2020, she was awarded a Fellowship by the British Pharmacological Society and received the Vice-Chancellor’s Medal from the University of Nottingham in recognition of her contributions to Team Science. More recently, she was honoured with the BPS/AstraZeneca EDI Prize for her continued leadership in research culture development. Her research has led to highly cited publications in the areas of cancer and angiogenesis, with recent high-impact papers published in Cell Chemical Biology, Communications Biology, FASEB Journal, British Journal of Pharmacology, and Biochemical Pharmacology. Her work focuses on elucidating the molecular pharmacology of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF-A) isoforms and VEGFR2 receptors. She has contributed to the development of fluorescent ligands to study VEGFR2 (in collaboration with Promega), and has applied NanoBRET approaches to monitor GPCR target engagement in tumours in vivo (in partnership with Monash University). Her laboratory continues to explore the mechanisms underlying the hypertensive effects of receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors, particularly those targeting VEGF pathways. In September 2024, she assumed the role of Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Research Academy and Research Culture Development. As a member of the University of Nottingham’s senior strategic leadership team, she is focused on enhancing student engagement, experience, and learning. Her aim is to ensure the University remains at the forefront of research and teaching excellence, particularly at the postgraduate level. Central to this is her commitment to supporting supervisory teams, fostering an exceptional research environment, and ensuring the student voice is valued and aligned with the University’s strategic priorities.

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Assoc Prof Jens Titze

RD Wright Lecturer

Wednesday 10 December

Assoc Prof Jens Titze

I began working on salt and water homeostasis as a medical student in 1991. At that time, the generally accepted belief was that body Na+ content is constant, and that any increase would elevate blood pressure. Measuring Na+ balance in humans preparing for long-term space missions, however, we found that rhythmically Na+ dis- and re-appeared from an at that time invisible storage site. Developing novel tools, we saw that rodents and humans store large amounts of Na+ under their skin and in skeletal muscle, and that the storage process is physiologically regulated. This new way of thinking about the body fluids quickly delivered new research avenues in immunology (immunological host defence and auto-immunity), endocrinology (insulin resistance, diabetes mellitus, and metabolic muscle function), and cardiovascular disease (hypertension research, heart failure). Today, our clinical research revolves around the fact that Na+ storage is secondary to intracellular K+ depletion, and that increasing K+ intake effectively reverses this process; with beneficial effects on blood pressure. In the basic research arena, we dream of solving a general methodological-physiological root problem in the field: our inability to visualize and quantify Na+ and K+ distribution disorders inside diseased cells at the µm scale in intact, hydrated organs.

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Prof Michael Stowasser

Paul Korner Awardee Lecturer Wednesday 10 December

Prof Michael Stowasser

Michael is currently Director of the Hypertension Units and of the Endocrine Hypertension Research Centre within the University of Queensland Frazer Institute at Greenslopes and Princess Alexandra Hospitals in Brisbane. He has over 30 years clinical research experience in pathogenesis and management of hypertension and especially of endocrine varieties including primary aldosteronism, renovascular hypertension, pheochromocytoma and familial hyperkalemic hypertension. Working with mentor Richard Gordon, he helped to demonstrate that primary aldosteronism is at least 10 times more common than previously thought, and is the commonest specifically treatable and potentially curable form of hypertension. Subsequent studies have involved determining genetic bases for primary aldosteronism, examining non-blood pressure dependent effects of aldosterone excess, improving methods of detection, diagnostic workup and management of primary aldosteronism, exploring the pathogenesis and genetics of other salt sensitive forms of hypertension (including familial hyperkalemic hypertension) and investigating how dietary potassium lowers blood pressure.

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Prof Francine Marques

Colin I Johnston Lecturer
Thursday 11 December

Prof Francine Marques

Professor Francine Marques is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Emerging Leader, Viertel Charitable Foundation, and National Heart Foundation Fellow. She completed a PhD in genomics at the University of Sydney in 2012, followed by postdoctoral training supported with NHMRC and Heart Foundation fellowships. Since 2018, Prof Marques leads the Hypertension Research Laboratory at Monash University, currently based at the Victorian Heart Institute, where she serves as Deputy Director (Discovery). Her team aims to build exceptional scientists that help improve cardiovascular health, using translational approaches to lower blood pressure via the gut microbiome. Her research program has attracted over $12 million in competitive funding and resulted in over 140 peer-reviewed papers and 34 awards, including the 2019 American Heart Association Hypertension Council Goldblatt Award, the 2020 High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia and 2021 International Society of Hypertension Mid-Career Awards, the 2021 Australian Academy of Science Gottschalk Medal, and the 2024 Australian Society of Medical Research Peter Doherty Leading Light Award.

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Prof Seth Masters

Austin Doyle Lecturer

Thursday 11 December

Prof Seth Masters

Prof Seth Masters is Centre Head of the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Disease at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research (Australia). He has uncovered the genetic basis for several autoinflammatory diseases and continues to manage the associated Australian Registry, AADRY. Mechanistically this work has defined the innate immune pathways driving inflammation as a result of aberrant proteasome function, retrograde transport and mitochondrial homeostasis. This has led to improved understanding of innate immune pathways in complex disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease and motor neuron disease. Prof Masters is a Scientific Advisor for NRG Therapeutics (UK) and Odyssey Therapeutics (USA) and was appointed as a Fellow of the Viertel Foundation, HHMI-Wellcome Trust and the NHMRC.

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Dr Jamie Kitt

BIHS Lecturer

Thursday 11 December

Dr Jamie Kitt

Dr Jamie Kitt is a dual accredited Cardiology & General Internal Medicine (GIM) Consultant trained in Oxford & Thames Valley, United Kingdom.  He has sub-specialty training in Echo, Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), Cardiac CT, and Hypertension, the latter of which complements his research expertise within hypertensive pregnancy. He now works as an imaging cardiologist in London for the NHS and continues his post-doctoral research in Oxford in Hypertensive Pregnancy.

He completed a PhD studying the cardiac complications of hypertensive pregnancy between 2018-2022. Under the supervision of Prof Paul Leeson, he was awarded a British Heart Foundation fellowship during which they performed a randomized trial on post-partum self-management of hypertensive pregnancy (POP-HT). This resulted in several high-impact publications in the field of hypertensive pregnancy, with the key POP-HT trial papers published in JAMA, Hypertension and Circulation to coincide with the trial’s presentation at American Heart Association’s late breaking Science in November 2023.  He was awarded the early career research award of the British and Irish Hypertension Society in Autumn 2024 and the University of Oxford Graduate Prize Award in March 2025 for this body of work. The vascular paper is pending publication in Hypertension and the brain and renal outcomes from are under peer review. Prof Leeson and Dr Kitt are now collaborating in a multi-center PCORI funded trial of postpartum BP self-management in the USA, the multi-center validation of POP-HT in the UK (SNAP2), and help run dedicated postpartum hypertension clinics in Oxford and London. Dr Kitt looks forward to sharing this body of work at the Australian Hypertension society in late 2025 and working with Prof Larry Chamley to adapt the principles developed in POP-HT to the New Zealand model of postpartum care during a visiting lectureship in December 2025

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Assoc Prof Christophe Stove

Closing Keynote Address

Friday 12 December

Assoc Prof Christophe Stove

Christophe Stove is associate-professor at Ghent University, Belgium, where he heads the Laboratory of Toxicology at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Besides teaching several courses and being in charge of forensic toxicology service activities, he is an active researcher. Tow research lines can be distinguished: microsampling applications and associated challenges in the context of therapeutic drug monitoring and toxicology, and the pharmacological characterization and screening of new psychoactive substances. He was the promotor of over 20 PhDs and has published almost 300 peer-reviewed publications, which collectively have been cited over 10000 times (Google Scholar). He is currently Board/Council Member of 2 national (BLT, KBGGG) and 2 international (TIAFT and IATDMCT) associations.

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