Daniela Panáková is an endowed Associate Professor for Cardiac Genetics of Congenital Structural Heart Disease at Christian Albrecht Univeristy Kiel/ University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel, Germany and Professor at German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK Professor).
Daniela performed her graduate studies in the lab of Suzanne Eaton and received her PhD from Technical University Dresden / Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany at 2005. She continued her training as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School / Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA in the lab of Calum MacRae. In 2011, she was awarded the prestigious Helmholtz Young Investigator Award to establish her independent research group at the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) in Berlin, Germany. In 2024 she was appointed a Professor and moved to Kiel.
Her long-standing research interest is dedicated to deciphering how morphogenetic signaling and physiological cues orchestrate cellular responses in development as well as in disease. By integrating developmental biology with molecular physiology, her work seeks to provide fundamental insights into the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure and congenital heart defects (CHD). The work of her lab centers on three core areas: heart development, heart regeneration, and personalized CHD disease modeling.