Release date: November 29, 2022

This interview is a part of the Polish and Flourish series—where we speak with inspiring individuals living in the US who are either Polish or have Polish roots.

What are the three ingredients to success that enable people to flourish? Team work, collaboration and the mission behind the work.

Learn about Dr. Anna Wolska’s journey into becoming a staff scientist at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the role her great biology teachers, mentors, and family played in her career development. Dr. Wolska also speaks about her mission to make heart diseases preventable and help individuals live long healthy lives.

Watch the video here:

Biography:

Anna Wolska, MS, PhD, FAHA, is a Polish medical biologist and a Staff Scientist at the Lipoprotein Metabolism Laboratory of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, USA where she leads several projects related to lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular diseases.

Dr. Anna Wolska was born in Nowy Targ, Poland and later moved to Gdansk, Poland where she obtained in 2009 her Masters in Science (MS) degree from the University of Gdansk. In addition, she also completed her training in education of Biology and became a certified Teacher of Biology. She then joined a doctoral program (PhD) in medical biology at Medical University of Gdansk, which she completed in 2014 on Lipoprotein Lipase. She also then completed postgraduate studies in clinical laboratory medicine and became a certified Clinical Chemist from the same university.

In 2014, Dr. Wolska visited the Lipoprotein Metabolism Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a top biomedical research center in the United States, for a 3-month internship supported by a grant from the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry. Because of her expertise and training, she was offered a Post-Doctoral Fellow position by the chief of the laboratory, Dr. Alan T. Remaley, and was working there since then. In 2021, she has become a Staff Scientist and has continued her research in the field of lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular diseases.  

Dr. Wolska has over 15 years of experience in biomedical sciences and has broad training in basic science, translational medicine, molecular epidemiology, and drug development in the field of cardiovascular diseases. She has made multiple major discoveries that have both great basic science and translational interests. She is an inventor on multiple US patents based on her research, and has published high-impact factor publications, as well as several book chapters on lipoprotein metabolism. Her research has been widely commented in press-media as novel and impactful for future drug development, and one of her possible new therapies for lowering plasma lipids has been licensed by a major pharmaceutical company.

Dr. Wolska has received several awards for her research. Most notably Orloff Science Award from the NHLBI in 2020, Young Investigator Award from the European Atherosclerosis Society (EAS) in 2021 and Personalized Medicine Award from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC) in 2022. In 2022, Dr. Wolska was honored to become a Fellow of the prestigious American Heart Association (AHA) for “an excellence, innovative and sustained scientific and professional accomplishments in the area of heart diseases”.