Eva is a Canadian-trained scientist who has had an international career pursuing her curiosity to understand the defects of skeletal muscle in various diseases and now is passionate about finding effective therapies to treat rare neuromuscular diseases.

As the inaugural Executive Director for SOLVE FSHD, Eva will apply that passion and her insight into muscle biology and drug discovery and development to tackle the barriers and accelerate a cure for FSHD. Together with the relentless drive and support of Chip Wilson and Neil Camarta, this team will SOLVE FSHD!

Eva obtained her Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Waterloo in Canada and completed post-doctoral training at the University of Sydney, Australia and UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, focusing on the role of intracellular calcium in muscle fatigue, transcriptional regulation of muscle fiber type determination and muscle plasticity.

Eva’s career has spanned the academic and pharmaceutical industries, with previous positions at Pfizer, the University of Maryland, MyoTherapeutics, Cytokinetics and NMD Pharma. While at Pfizer Eva shifted her career from academic research focusing on cellular and molecular mechanisms of muscle function to the discovery and development of muscle-targeted therapies. Her career has increasingly focused on targeting the underlying skeletal muscle pathologies in rare neuromuscular diseases, including muscular dystrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Eva has also been a team leader in late-stage drug discovery to early phase clinical development programs across a span of therapeutic areas including neuromuscular and cardiovascular diseases, obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis. Over the past five years she has led the nonclinical development of numerous drug candidates in clinical trials for ALS, SMA, myasthenia gravis and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Eva has led or contributed to ten programs moving from a novel research idea to first in human clinical trials, focusing on translational pharmacology and safety to support IND and CTA filings. Ten of these molecules have safely been tested in Phase 1 and four have reached Phase 2 proof of concept milestones. Eva has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and more than 100 conference abstracts and presentations focusing on skeletal muscle fatigue and disease mechanisms for metabolic disease, aging and neuromuscular diseases.