Alessia Gimelli is a cardiologist and nuclear medicine specialist. She is a wife and a mother of two adolescents, and she knows well the challenges professional women face in balancing family and work.

She is the clinical lead of the Nuclear Cardiology unit at Fondazione Toscana G. Monasterio (FTGM), Pisa, Italy. She has been very active in medical education, and she has been leading the Nuclear Cardiology clinical training program and in charge of the curriculum of nuclear cardiology for cardiology trainees at the University of Pisa since 2012.  She has participated in many clinical research projects and authored numerous articles in peer-reviewed medical journals.

During the pandemic, in order to share education and discussion within the whole community of cardiac imagers, Dr. Gimelli co-founded with Prof. Wael Jaber from Cleveland Clinic, a freely accessible web platform called “Cardiac Imaging Agora” (www.cardiacimagingagora.com). This initiative is aimed at spreading the knowledge of cardiac imaging everywhere and to everybody, removing any barrier to education. The platform has been a great success and the number of visualizations increases every day.

Dr. Gimelli is the Treasurer of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) (2020-2022) and former EACVI Vice-President and the Chair of Nuclear Cardiology and CT section (2018-2020). She has been invited as a Board member in several ESC Committees and in the EACVI Task Force on Women (2020-2022). These activities have exposed her to the complexity of the cardiological community.

Finally, she is the Section Editor for Imaging of the new European Heart Journal Open, and Associate Editor of the new journal Imaging, as well as participating on editorial boards of other international cardiology and imaging journals.

In October 2019, Dr. Gimelli won an ESC grant and attended the Women Transforming Leadership Programme (WTLP) run by the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford (UK). During this course, she had the incredible opportunity to develop her leadership skills further to serve the scientific community even better, as well as improve her abilities to support female colleagues.