Wolfram C. Poller, MD, PhD

Dr. Poller is an interventional cardiologist at the MGH Corrigan Minehan Heart Center and a principal investigator at the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center. He is a member of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
The Poller lab investigates brain-body networks in cardiovascular diseases using state-of-the-art technologies of neurorecording and neuromodulation including fiber photometry, chemogenetics and optogenetics, brain region-specific knockout mice, as well as mono- and polysynaptic viral tracing. Working at the crossroads of neuroscience, immunology, and cardiology, the Poller Lab aims to understand how different brain regions control and are controlled by the immune and cardiovascular systems. Dr. Poller’s lab strives to translate mouse findings into specific brain center manipulations in humans to shape the course of cardiovascular disease treatment.

Dr. Poller earned his MD (2011) and PhD equivalent doctoral degree in neuroscience receiving a summa cum laude degree (2012) from the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. He was trained in general and interventional cardiology as well as cardiac rhythm device therapies at the Charité and received his German board certification in Internal Medicine and Cardiology in 2017. From 2018 to 2021, he did his Postdoctoral Fellowship training in the Swirski laboratory at MGH and was funded by a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Upon completing his postdoctorate work, he served as Instructor and Faculty Member of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City from 2021 to 2024. The results of his work on brain-immune communication during acute stress were published in Nature (Poller et al., 2022). He currently receives R01 funding from the NHLBI to investigate brain-immune crosstalk in myocardial infarction.

Research Areas
Cardiac Physiology and Disease
Vascular Biology and Metabolism