Dr. Alexandra Williams

I am a clinical cardiovascular physiologist, currently a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Faculty of Medicine and the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD). Although spanning a range of different conceptual approaches and methodologies, my research is increasingly focused on the investigation of sex-based differences in the autonomic control of the heart in health and disease. At ICORD, with supervisors Dr. Chris West and Dr. Brian Kwon, my research applies a bench-to-bedside approach to determine the acute impacts of spinal cord injury (SCI) on the heart, discover novel therapies to improve neurological outcomes and identify sex-related differences in cardiac function and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in the SCI population. Further to my work in SCI, I am notably interested in the impacts of hypoxia and high altitude environments on cardio-autonomic function, both in lowlanders and populations native to high altitude.