Rafeeh Soleimani Dinani is a PhD candidate at the Department of Physiology at the Amsterdam UMC location, under the supervision of Prof. Jolanda van der Velden, Dr. Diederik Kuster and Dr. Paul Wijnker (funded by VICI, ZonMW)
She received her master degree from university of Barcelona in translational medicine. During this program, she got acquainted with the process and concept of so called, bench to bedside, which aims to increase the efficiency by which the new therapeutic strategies developed through basic research, are tested clinically. Rafeeh did her primary internship in hospital clinic Barcelona learning about cardiac ablation surgery, and later her second internship and master thesis project at IBEC(institute for bioengineering of Catalonia) where she worked on differentiating human bone marrow stem cells into Skeletal muscle cells in 3D tissues. In continuance with her studies in translational medicine and with a main focus on cardiomyopathy disease modelling and drug screening, she is currently working on induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte models in 2D, using high through platform (MultiCell), and in engineered heart tissue to better understand the underlying mechanisms and effects of sarcomeric mutations causing cardiomyopathies and finding new potential therapeutics.