Cardiac Device Monitoring of Wildlife and Endangered Animals

Vice President of Physician and Patient Experience, Medtronic Electrophysiology Therapies

Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota

Bio: Dr. Tim Laske is currently the Vice President of Research & Development for the Cardiac Ablation Solutions Business at Medtronic. He is a Medtronic Bakken Fellow and Technical Fellow and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. His previous roles at Medtronic include VP of Research and Business Development for AF Solutions, Senior Product Development Director for Heart Valves, Senior Program Director for Transcatheter Heart Valves, Technology Director for Cardiac Rhythm Therapy Delivery, and various technology management and design engineering positions. Prior to his 31-year tenure at Medtronic, he worked as a Design Engineer at Ford Motor Company in Crash Safety and Advanced Vehicle Systems Engineering. He has a BS degree in both Biological Sciences and Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Minnesota where he serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery. His doctoral research was centered on the use of isolated working hearts in the design of medical devices and in parallel co-founded the Visible Heart® Laboratories. In addition to medical device design and cardiac physiology, his research interests include the study of hibernation physiology in wild black bear and brown bear populations and conservation of endangered species. He has more than 95 US patents and numerous publications in the fields of Biomedical Engineering and Wildlife Biology/Ecology.

Professor
Department of Surgery
Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology
Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota

Bio: Dr. Iaizzo also serves on the graduate faculties in Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience, Integrative Biology & Physiology, Biological Science, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Mechanical Engineering. He is the Director of the Malignant Hyperthermia Diagnostic Center and Medtronic Professor of Visible Heart® Research. Additionally, he is the Associate Director and Medtronic Chair of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine, also at the University of Minnesota. He earned both MS and PhD degrees (Focus: Physiology/Neurophysiology) from the University of Minnesota. His main research focus is translational systems physiology, where his research group does a broad range of studies. The Visible Heart® Laboratories are well known for their multimodal imaging techniques of functional cardiac anatomies and device testing within large mammalian hearts, including human: see the Atlas of Human Cardiac Anatomy. Other research areas include: cardiac pacing and ablation, muscle pathophysiology and biophysical properties, thermoregulation, black bear hibernation, 3D computational modeling and printing and educational uses of virtual reality. In 2002, he was acknowledged as a “Distinguished University Teaching Professor”. Since 1990, he has trained over 200 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and medical students in his laboratories. Dr. Iaizzo, has authored more than 280 original articles, over 100 book chapters, edited 5 books, and is on numerous patents related to medical devices. In 2012, he was named to College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) for "outstanding contributions to research and education in translational systems physiology and cardiovascular engineering". In 2015 he was named a Fellow of the Heart Rhythm Society and in 2016 was made a Senior Fellow of IEEE.