Jil Tardiff, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Tucson and a member of the Clinical and Translational Institute at the BIO5 Institute. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Tardiff’s work focuses on the mechanisms that underlie the development of the most common form of genetic cardiomyopathy, those caused by mutations in proteins of the cardiac sarcomere, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). These complex disorders affect one in 500 individuals of all ages and represent the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in the field. Her studies detailing the mechanisms of disease pathogenesis at the level of individual cells using transgenic mouse models has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2001 and the work has been cited in support of new clinical trials to evaluate novel treatment modalities for this challenging cardiomyopathy. More recently, in collaboration with Steven Schwartz in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Arizona, her lab has developed computational approaches to modeling and eventually predicting disease severity based on protein structure. To fully translate these basic research findings to the clinical realm, one of her main goals remains the development of an HCM Center of Excellence at the University of Arizona where patients from all over the southwest can obtain lifelong cutting edge medical care for this complex and often devastating disorder.