Johannes Backs

Johannes Backs studied human medicine at the University of Freiburg and graduated in 2002 in the Department of Cardiology, Angiology and Pneumology at Heidelberg University Hospital. Here he worked as a Clinician Scientist from 1998-2003. He went abroad from 2003-2007 as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Eric Olson at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, USA. After returning to the Department of Cardiology at Heidelberg University Hospital, he led an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group from 2007-2013. Since 2013 he holds a W3 professorship of the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) and the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg, from the same year he led the Cardiac Epigenetics group. From 2015-2019, he was director of the Department of Molecular Cardiology and Epigenetics. He was appointed as full university professor at Heidelberg University in 2019 and since then he has been leading the newly founded Institute of Experimental Cardiology. His research focuses on how environmental influences and comorbidities such as stress, diabetes and cancer can interact with the cardiac genome at the molecular level and lead to heart failure. Since 2019, he has been spokesperson of the DZHK Partner Site Heidelberg/Mannheim, since 2020 he is a board member of the German Society of Cardiology (DGK) and a member of the DFG study section for Cardiovascular and Metabolic Research. Since 2021, he has coordinated the Innovation Campus Rhine-Neckar Region. He is the spokesperson of the newly founded Collaborative Research Center CRC1550 "Molecular Circuits of Heart Disease" since 2022.