I am from Lake Villa, Illinois. My current research focuses on investigating the heterogeneity of cardiac fibroblast activation in disease settings. Fibroblasts are key reparative cells following tissue injury, but how they become further specified to carry out diverse functions at and around the injury site is not well understood. Diving deeper into fibroblast activation will hopefully lead us to promising targets for preventing and reversing excessive cardiac fibrosis that often progresses to chronic disease.