Biography: Dr. Schunke grew up in southern California and earned her undergraduate degree from University of California at Davis in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior in 2005. She pursued graduate studies at Rutgers University in the lab of Drs. Merrill and Denhardt studying oxidant injury in the mammalian myocardium. During her graduate work she established a relationship with multiple clinician researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital studying heart failure (David Kass, MD) and pancreatic cancer (Joseph Herman, MD) which led her to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Nauder Faraday, MD. While there she developed a novel murine model of atherothrombotic stroke to study anti-thrombotic therapies, with particular interest in non-platelet targets. She then moved to University of Hawaii to study HIF-1a, the master regulator of oxygen homeostasis, in the context of myocardial infarction and stroke. She was awarded a Career Development Award from the American Heart Association and accepted a position at George Washington University in the Biomedical Engineering department where she integrated her hypoxia work with a multidisciplinary group interested in cardiac autonomic dysfunction in the setting of myocardial infarction and sleep apnea. She returned to University of Hawaii in 2020 as an Assistant Professor to continue her AHA and CTSA funded research projects as well as a new focus on autonomic dysfunction in diabetes.