Doan is Co-Director of the Newcastle Centre of Excellence in Cardio-Oncology Research, an academic pharmacist and an accomplished basic and translational scientist whose work spans cardio-oncology and cardiometabolic disease. Her expertise is in cardiometabolic pathophysiology, with a focus on obesity, redox stress and vascular biology, and her research has advanced understanding of adipose tissue biology and angiogenesis and their impact on cardiovascular health.
She completed her PhD in Medicine in 2008, developing an animal model of aortic stenosis and demonstrating its prevention with ACE inhibitors, and showing how vitamin D deficiency affects vascular function (work published in the American Journal of Medicine). She then undertook postdoctoral training in Boston, where she established expertise in obesity research and adipose tissue biology and was among the first to characterise the role of the anti-angiogenic factor VEGF-A165b in obesity, with findings published in Circulation, Nature Medicine and Diabetes.
After returning to Australia in 2015 to establish her own research group, Doan relocated to the University of Newcastle in 2017, where she co-led the Cardiometabolic and Vascular Research Group and grew a multidisciplinary team of postdoctoral fellows, research assistants and higher-degree students. Together with Professor Aaron Sverdlov, she established Australia’s first integrated bench-to-bedside cardio-oncology program, linking laboratory research with a clinical outpatient service at Calvary Mater Newcastle that addresses cancer therapy-related cardiotoxicity.
Research interests
- Cardio-oncology
- Cardiometabolic disease
- Obesity, redox stress and vascular biology
- Adipose tissue biology and angiogenesis
- Biomarker discovery
Highlights
- Co-Director, Newcastle Centre of Excellence in Cardio-Oncology Research
- Pioneering work on VEGF-A165b in obesity, cited more than 200 times
- Multiple patents, with presentations at CSANZ, ESC and AHA
- Recognised as an outstanding cardiovascular research leader at CSANZ 2015
- Research featured by the ABC, The Limbic and news.com.au