Date: 26 January 2026 (Monday) 
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Jason Wong

Eleni Giannoulatou leads the Computational Genomics Group at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, and is a Professor in the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on identifying the genetic determinants of cardiovascular disease through the development and application of computational and statistical genomics approaches. She received her DPhil in Bioinformatics from the University of Oxford and undertook postdoctoral research at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, UK. Eleni is supported by an NHMRC Investigator Grant and is an Honorary National Heart Foundation of Australia Future Leader Fellow.

Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) is a poorly understood cause of acute coronary syndrome that predominantly affects women. Evidence to date suggests a complex genetic architecture, while a family history is reported for some cases. In this talk I will present our investigations of the genetic causes of SCAD. We have explored monogenic causes as well as the role of polygenic risk in sporadic and familial cases of SCAD. We have also applied polygenic risk scores for comorbid traits in our well-phenotyped SCAD cohort to explore shared genetic architecture. This individual-level approach aims to disentangle causal from pleiotropic relationships and further improve our understanding of SCAD’s genetic basis.