Thirteen Proposals Selected for 2025 Additional Ventures Expansion Award
March 6, 2025
After a record number of submissions, 13 outstanding proposals have been selected for funding through the 2025 Additional Ventures Expansion Award, with 31% of awardees being new to the single ventricle space. Each project explores a bold research question poised to significantly impact the field in just one year, and we applaud the investigators and teams whose proposals were selected.
The complexity of single ventricle heart disease necessitates a multidisciplinary approach to scientific discovery, and the diversity of selected proposals aligns with this need. Collectively, these proposals span a number of fields, including neuroscience, stem cell biology, imaging, and bioengineering, and explore multiple organ systems beyond the heart, such as the lung, liver, and brain.
We anticipate our new awardees’ progress will fuel lasting impact through new findings and advancements that ultimately revolutionize single ventricle treatment and care. We look forward to providing investigators with opportunities to collaborate with and learn from fellow scientists working toward a common goal of curing single ventricle.
About the Additional Ventures Expansion Award
The Additional Ventures Expansion Award is a one-time $50,000 award that enables teams to rapidly develop, test, and implement novel, high-risk ideas in the single ventricle space. This program fills a gap in existing funding opportunities to fast-track scientific advancement, allowing bold new ideas to accelerate forward and find answers quickly, while also serving as an essential entry point to welcome new investigators to the field.
The Expansion Award is open to investigators in any field whose prior or ongoing research holds significant relevance and application to single ventricle. Including this most recent round of Expansion Award funding, $2.25M has been awarded through the Expansion Award Program.
Learn more about all of Additional Ventures’ research award programs.
2025 Expansion Award Recipients
| Daniel Castellanos, MD | The Impact of Right Ventricular-Dependent Coronary Arteries in Patients with Fontan Circulation and Pulmonary Atresia with Intact Ventricular Septum | Boston Children’s Hospital |
| Eamon Doyle, PhD | Approaches for Non-Invasively Assessing Lung Perfusion and Ventilation in Single Ventricle | Children’s Hospital Los Angeles |
| Nicole Dubois, PhD | Cell and Tissue Signatures in Single Ventricle Human Fetal Hearts | Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai |
| Whitney Edwards, PhD | Establishing a Role for Protein Prenylation in Ventricular Chamber Development and Function | The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Bruce Johnson, PhD | The Pulmonary Circulation and Alveolar-Capillary Reserve in Single Ventricle Hearts | Mayo Clinic |
| Sonnet Jonker, PhD | Redistribution of Cardiac Output in an Ovine Model of Impaired Left Ventricular Inflow | Oregon Health & Science University |
| Kyle Loh, PhD | Could Unexpected Lineage Plasticity between the Heart and Umbilical Cord Potentially Contribute to Single Ventricle Heart Disease? | Stanford University |
| Yibing Qyang, PhD | Miniature Pacemaker-Guided Pulsatile Conduits Towards Single Ventricle Repair | Yale University |
| Caitlin Rollins, MD, SM | Glymphatic Disruption in Children with Single Ventricle | Boston Children’s Hospital |
| Vahid Serpooshan, PhD | A 3D Bioprinted Fontan-Associated Liver Disease (FALD)-on-a-Chip Platform | Emory University |
| Daniel Shiwarski, PhD | Recreating Fontan-Associated Portal Vein Hypertension and Fibrosis in a 3D Bioprinted Hepatic Sinusoidal Vascular System | University of Pittsburgh |
| Colleen Witzenburg, PhD | Simulating Staged Ventricular Recruitment: Assessing Ventricular Growth in Patients with Borderline Left Heart | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Quan Zhu, PhD | Spatiotemporal Molecular Cartography of 3D-Human Heart Organoids: A Novel Model for Single Ventricle Defects | University of California San Diego |