Elizabeth Jones

Professor

Elizabeth Jones is a Professor in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences of KU Leuven and a Coordinating Senior Researcher in Department of Cardiology of Maastricht University. She did her masters and PhD at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Scott Fraser. In her graduate work, she developed time-lapse imaging techniques for mammalian embryos and showed that mechanical forces were required for vascular remodeling during development. She did her post-doctoral work at the College de France under the supervision of Anne Eichmann, with a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship. There, she studied the interplay of hemodynamics and gene expression in arterial-venous differentiation. She was an assistant and then associate professor of Chemical Engineering at McGill University from 2007 to 2013. During her time at McGill, she was a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair. She moved her research group to KU Leuven in January 2014. She joined the team in Maastricht, on a part time basis, starting in January 2020. 

Dr Jones’s main focus is on understanding the process of vascular remodeling in development and disease. Specifically, she investigates angiogenesis, vessel regression, vessel enlargement and the process of arteriovenous differentiation. She worked extensively in mechanotransduction and the role that blood flow plays in this process. She has studied how mechanical forces from flow influence gene expression involved in sprouting and arterial-venous differentiation. She has developed techniques to concurrently image changes in vascular networks and the flow dynamics that are present, using time-lapse microscopy. More recently, she has begun investigated microvascular changes in associated with co-morbidities and the role that inappropriate vascular rarefaction plays in disease progression. Her interest is in understanding the role of microvascular and immune cells in the development of diastolic dysfunction.

Dr Jones is a member of the ERA-CVD consortium, LYMIT-DIS, that studies microvascular and lymphatic changes in HFpEF. She also works closely with Stephane Heymans, a world-renown cardiologist, and they share two FWO grants to study HFpEF. She is the coordinator of the H2020 consortium CRUCIAL, that aims to detect tools to detect and treat microvascular rarefaction in heart failure and dementia.