Principal Investigator
Wolfram Poller, MD, PhD
Dr. Poller is an Interventional Cardiologist at the MGH Corrigan Minehan Heart Center and a Principal Investigator at the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center. He also serves as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Together with his research team at the Poller Lab, he studies brain-body communication in cardiovascular and neurological diseases.
Dr. Poller earned his MD and PhD equivalent doctoral degree in neuroscience with summa cum laude from the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. He was trained in general and interventional cardiology as well as cardiac rhythm device therapies at the Charité and received his German board certification in Internal Medicine and Cardiology in 2017. From 2018 to 2021, he conducted his Postdoctoral Fellowship training in the Swirski laboratory at MGH funded by a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation. After his PostDoc, he served as Instructor and Faculty Member of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City from 2021 to 2024. The results of his work on brain-immune communication during acute stress were published in Nature (Poller et al., 2022). Dr. Poller started his independent research laboratory at MGH in March 2024 and his current funding includes an R01 from the NHLBI to investigate brain-immune crosstalk in myocardial infarction.
Postdocs
Shivnarayan Dhuppar, PhD
Shiv has a PhD in Physics from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) India. In the Poller lab, he studies the effects of prenatal stress on the immunity and cardiac health of the offspring. He enjoys solving problems at the intersection of different disciplines.
Jing Zhu, PhD
Jing earned her PhD from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry in China, where she researched tumor vasculature through single-cell sequencing, sparking a strong interest in vascular biology. In 2024, she joined the Poller Lab to investigate the complex interactions between the brain and heart in heart disease. Outside the lab, Jing enjoys volleyball, hiking, and seasonal travel.
Isra Tamin, MD, PhD
Dr. Isra Tamim, MD/PhD, is a neurology resident at Charité University Hospital, working in the interdisciplinary stroke research group led by Prof. Matthias Endres. From 2018 to 2020, she pursued her MD/PhD research in the Neurovascular Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital under the supervision of Prof. Cenk Ayata, completing her degree in 2023 at Charité. Her doctoral research explored the bidirectional interactions between migraine and epilepsy, with a focus on spreading depression as an endogenous antiseizure mechanism. Currently, her work in the Poller Lab investigates central stress circuits activated after ischemic stroke and their role in cardiac damage.
Samir Ali, MD
Samir earned his MD in 2024 and is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is pursuing a career in cardiology, driven by a passion for developing innovative strategies to address complex medical challenges. His current work focuses on coronary calcifications and advancing survival outcomes in sepsis, aiming to make a meaningful impact on patient care and the broader field of medicine. Outside the hospital, Samir enjoys playing football and exploring new cuisines. He welcomes collaboration—feel free to reach out!