Gernot Plank is Professor of Computational Cardiology at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. He received an M.Sc. Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1996 and a Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2000, both from the Technical University of Graz, Austria. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at Technical University of Valencia, Spain (2000–2002), at the University of Calgary, Canada (2003) and, as a Marie Curie Fellow, he held a Visiting Faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University, USA (2006–2008). In 2008 he became Academic Fellow at the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Oxford Computing Laboratory at the University of Oxford, U.K before being appointed as Associate Professor in 2011 at the Medical University of Graz. Since 2018 he is Professor of Computational Cardiology and head of the Computational Cardiology Laboratory.
His research has been supported by grants from the Austrian Science Fund, NIH, Wellcome Trust, European FP7 and H2020 awards as well as by industry and resulted in more than 120 peer-reviewed journal publications. His basic research interests are focused on the development of computational methods for modeling total cardiac function and their application to the development of anatomically accurate and biophysically detailed in silico models for gaining mechanistic insights into the pathological electrophysiological, electromechanical and mechano-fluidic behavior of the heart. Jointly with Dr. Vigmond he is the key developer of the cardiac modeling software CARPentry which is used by many of the leading cardiac modeling centers around the world. His work has a strong translational component centered on improving diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases with the main focus on pacing therapies to treat arrhythmias and pump dysfunction. In this regard parameter identification and data assimilation strategies for personalizing models to a specific patient have become a major avenue of research in his lab. As a Co-founder of NumeriCor he is actively involved in the commercialization of simulation and modeling technologies as medical device development tools.