Peter Kohl (physiologist)
Peter Kohl is a German scientist specializing in integrative cardiac research. He studies heterocellular electrophysiological interactions in cardiac tissue, myocardial structure-function relationships using 'wet' and 'dry' lab models, and mechano-electrical autoregulation of the heart.
Education
Kohl studied medicine and biophysics in Moscow before completing his doctorate and his residency in physiology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Supported by a scholarship from the, he went as a post-doctoral researcher to the chair of Prof. Denis Noble, Department of Physiology at the University of Oxford, where - using a combination of experimental and theoretical models - he explored cardiac mechanobiology and heterocellular interactions.Career
Supported by personal fellowships from the UK Royal Society and the British Heart Foundation, he founded the Cardiac Mechano-Electric Feedback Lab at Oxford. Work from this time ranged from the mechanistic explanation of the Bainbridge effect in isolated pacemaker cells stretched during patch clamp measurements with carbon fibres, the description of a stretch-induced increase in calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum as a mechanism contributing to the Frank–Starling law, to the exploration of direct electrical coupling of cardiac fibroblasts and muscle cells.After two decades of research and teaching at Oxford, Kohl was appointed Inaugural Chair in Cardiac Biophysics and Systems Biology at Imperial College London. Work during this time, funded by the, focused on the development and use of novel optogenetic and fluorometric techniques, resulting in the first functional demonstration of heterocellular electrical cell coupling in native heart tissue. After five years in London, Kohl was recruited to Freiburg University in 2016 as the founding director of the Institute for Experimental Cardiovascular Medicine.
The English-language IEKM is structured with flat hierarchies and a broad interdisciplinary profile. About 40% of staff are from outside Germany, with scientific backgrounds in physiology, pharmacology, medicine, biology, physics, engineering and mathematics. The institute has grown from 6 to almost 60 staff and students in just a few years, established a novel biobank concept, and it is committed to teaching in small group formats such as the new 1-year international with an annual intake of no more than 6 pre-PhD students.