Claudia Moreno wants to understand the mechanisms that govern heart rate adaptability. Her research focuses on the most robust oscillator in the body: the cardiac pacemaker. The Moreno lab studies pacemaker adaptability at different timescales, ranging from short-term adaptability that occurs within seconds, such as the instantaneous increase in heart rate during stressful situations, to long-term adaptability, which pertains to the adaptations that animals have developed to maintain the wide range of heart rates observed in nature. Her overarching goal is to identify novel mechanisms of heart rate control that can be leveraged to prevent and treat heart rhythm disorders.