Emilia Entcheva

Emilia Entcheva is a Bulgarian–American engineer who is a professor of biomedical engineering at George Washington University. She serves as Director of the Cardiac Optogenetics and Optical Imaging Laboratory. She is a Fellow of the Heart Rhythm Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Early life and education Entcheva studied electrical engineering at the Technical University, Sofia. Specifically, her work looked to understand how heart's fiber structure influences responses to external electric fields through bidomain finite element modeling. She conducted her postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University in 2001, developing fast optical mapping techniques for imaging excitation waves, that led to some of the first documentations of cardiac arrhythmias in a dish and their termination by electric fields.

Research and career In the early 2000s, Entcheva started her research group at Stony Brook University. She worked on cardiac cell and tissue engineering, optical mapping of arrhythmias, biomaterials, virus mediated gene delivery, systems biology and computational strategies for describing complex biological processes. In 2007, she started working on optogenetics: a strategy to control biological processes using light. She was among the first scientists to extend the applications of optogenetics to the heart for scalable drug testing platforms and for control of cardiac waves.

Entcheva moved to the Department of Biomedical Engineering at George Washington University in 2016. Her group continues to leverage cardiac optogenetics, optical mapping, human stem cell technology and gene modulation techniques to develop high-throughput testing platforms for drug screening and personalized medicine. These all-optical electrophysiology methods are scalable contactless means for comprehensive assessment of responses to drugs in heart cells and neurons; they are particularly useful in pre-clinical cardiotoxicity testing using human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs).

In 2016, Entcheva was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Selected publications