Early career scientist earns national fellowship to fight heart disease

Chelsea Phillips, a postdoctoral associate at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, has been awarded a 2026 Myocarditis Research Fellowship from the Myocarditis Foundation, recognizing her as part of a nationally competitive group of early career scientists advancing heart disease research.

Phillips works in the laboratory of cardiovascular scientist James Smyth, where she studies how viral infections disrupt electrical signaling in the heart and play a role in conditions such as myocarditis and cardiac arrhythmias.

Myocarditis is often underdiagnosed, and sudden cardiac death in otherwise healthy young people is among its most devastating consequences. Adenoviruses are among the most common infectious agents that cause myocarditis, but scientists don't fully understand how these infections disrupt cardiac function so rapidly.

Phillips’ research focuses on what happens in the earliest stages of infection, before the immune system begins damaging the heart. Her work investigates how adenovirus interferes with connexin43, a protein that forms gap junctions, the channels between heart cells that coordinate electrical signaling and maintain the rhythmic contraction of each heartbeat.

“This fellowship provides critical support to study how viral infections affect the heart at the earliest stages,” Phillips said. “That understanding could help identify new ways to detect a patient is at risk of a serious cardiac event such as a fatal arrhythmia and prevent this from occurring.”

“Chelsea is asking a question that the field has largely overlooked: What does the virus do to the heart before the immune response takes over? Her focus on connexin43 as an early target of adenoviral disruption opens a window into the molecular basis of arrhythmia in myocarditis that hasn't been well characterized. This fellowship is a recognition of the originality of that work,” said Smyth, associate professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (FBRI) and Virginia Tech's Department of Biological Sciences. “Developing the next generation of independent cardiovascular scientists is a priority I’ve worked to build into the fabric of FBRI through efforts like co-founding the FBRI postdoctoral association, and Chelsea's fellowship is exactly the kind of outcome that work is meant to produce.”

Smyth is a member of the institute's Center for Vascular and Heart Research.

Phillips earned her undergraduate degree in biology from Indiana Wesleyan University, where she began her research career. She completed her doctoral degree in neuroscience at the University of Michigan and is now developing an independent research focus on the molecular mechanisms linking viral infection to cardiac electrical disease.

Her background in gap junction biology and a desire to extend that work into the cardiovascular system brought her to the Smyth laboratory at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. 

The Myocarditis Research Fellowship work will focus on whether targeting connexin43 during early adenoviral infection could represent a strategy to prevent the electrical dysfunction that precedes immune-mediated damage in myocarditis, including in patients with pre-existing heart disease, who may be particularly vulnerable to infection-triggered arrhythmias. 

Findings from this work could inform therapeutic windows of intervention that current treatment approaches do not address.