DrMunira Xaymardan

Dr Munira Xaymardan is a trained oral and maxillofacial surgeon, research scientist and academic. She heads the Faculty of Dentistry’s Life Science Discipline and is a Senior Research Officer at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, Sydney. Dr Xaymardan obtained her dental and specialist surgical qualifications in China and worked in clinical practice and academia prior to moving to Australia. During her surgical training, Dr Xaymardan conducted research on tooth extraction in patients with cardiovascular compromise, requiring specialised training in cardiology. This, combined with her PhD studies in Australia on wound healing in vascular endothelial cells, set the course for a research career in cardiovascular medicine including exploring the dentistry-cardiology link. Her interests include cardiac stem cell research, tissue engineering and embryology (investigating the link between orofacial and cardiac muscle development and regeneration). She studies cardiac endogenous stem cells and stem cell trafficking during injury (e.g. homing of cells from bone marrow and uterine tissue to the heart). She is particularly interested in the effect of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) and its receptor on cardiac muscle development, tissue homeostasis, and post-injury cardiac muscle repair.Dr Xaymardan has worked as a postdoctoral scientist at Cornell University, New York with Associate Professor Jay M Edelberg on the effects of PDGF and other growth factors in vivo on post-MI cardiac muscle healing. In two and half years at the university, Dr Xaymardan published seven peer-reviewed journal articles, including two first-author publications in the Journal of Experimental Medicine and Circulation Research. She is co-inventor on two US patents. Dr Xaymardan continues to publish work of significant impact. She was equal first author on the Chong et al paper in Cell Stem Cell (2011), which defined a population of mesenchymal stem cell-like cardiac progenitor cells in the developing adult heart. The findings attracted wide press coverage including as a ‘research highlights’ segment in Nature(8 December 2011) based on the implications for tissue homeostasis and repair.

Dr Xaymardan teaches and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students and teaches continuing professional development (CPD) courses to dental professionals. As Head of the Life Science Discipline, she participated in the recent Life Science curriculum review toward a dentistry-based and research-informed curriculum and in the review and implementation of Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD) curriculum. “I am passionate about teaching and developing the highest quality dental professionals whose only goal is to provide the best patient care”, she says “and who understand the importance of rigorous scientific research in generating the innovations that form part of dental practice”.