Timothy Hacker, PhD

Tim Hacker completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996 in Exercise Physiology under the direction of A. James Liedtke developing swine models of cardiac hibernation and stunning. Next, he joined the faculty at Concordia University in Wisconsin to help create a new school of Physical Therapy. He returned to UW-Madison in 2000 to join the Cardiovascular Research Core Lab. His work at the Cardiovascular Research Core Lab facility provides researchers with surgical models of disease as well as non-invasive imaging and invasive physiologic monitoring of the disease process. Dr. Hacker has established cardiac disease models in mice, rats, rabbits, pigs, dogs and primates. Currently, the facility is conducting studies focusing on cell delivery devices and targeting, cell tracking, heart failure, arrhythmias, gene, drug and cell therapy and other cardiovascular diseases. His work examining defects in the lamin protein have led to a phase I clinical trial starting in 2014 to test a drug which slows or even reverses heart failure associated with lamin mutations.