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5 minutes with Elisabeth Ehler

01 February 2021

Dr Elisabeth Ehler was recently promoted to Professor of Cardiac Cell Biology, working across the School of Basic & Medical Biosciences and the School of Cardiovascular Medicine & Sciences. We interviewed Elisabeth to find out more about her career and life outside of work.

Pictured: Dr Elisabeth Ehler filming experiments at the Francis Crick Institute for virtual practicals

Please tell us about your career journey up to this point. What drew you to cardiac cell biology in particular?

I am originally from Austria and studied first Biology and then Cell Biology at the University of Salzburg there. My entire working life so far has involved the study of cytoskeletal proteins, muscle cells and microscopes and there is no change in sight! For my first postdoc, I worked in London for two years, actually already at the Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics, which was still based in Drury Lane in those days. After seven years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which was where I got introduced to confocal microscopy and cardiomyocytes, I returned to King's as a PI in 2003 and slowly worked my way up the ranks from Senior Lecturer to my most recent role as Professor. Cardiac Cell Biology is the ideal field for me because it combines the most attractive cell type (stripey if you stain them with the proper agents!) with the organ that is central to life.

What is a typical day like for you? How has your work/life changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

At my current stage of career, I am mainly glued to my laptop, answering emails, writing papers & grants, reviewing papers & grants, teaching & supervising students and marking their work. Whenever I get a chance to go to the lab to work at the bench and do an experiment or even better, can use a confocal microscope, it feels like a holiday for me! Now of course I spend the majority of my time in "home office" mode, which I do not like at all. I really miss brief exchanges with colleagues at the communal coffee machine and after work discussions in the pub.

What do you hope to achieve next? What do you think the major challenges and opportunities are in your field?

To be honest a major challenge in the future will be funding and recruiting well-trained scientists post-COVID and post-Brexit. As a very visual person, I find the advances in super resolution microscopy and in structural elucidation by cryo-electron microscopy particularly exciting.

Do you have any current research projects that you’d like to tell us about?

My long-standing interest is what makes a heart cell work and how that changes during heart disease. My lab investigates this at the level of the cell, mainly using biochemical and microscopy techniques. More recently we have started to explore signalling pathways that cause these changes and have embarked on high throughput screens for drugs that may be able to halt that process.

What is your favourite thing about working at King’s?

I love the interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical atmosphere at the Randall Centre for Cell & Molecular Biophysics and enjoy that thanks to my colleagues in the School of Cardiovascular Medicine & Sciences I also get exposed to research that is clinically relevant.

What do you do with your time outside academia?

I am a culture vulture and love going to the theatre, the opera and to art exhibitions, so lockdown life is far from ideal for me. Luckily several big opera houses do daily streamings, which has enabled me to keep my sanity. So far...