Dr. Anja Karlstaedt is an Assistant Professor of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, with an adjunct appointment at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She earned her M.D./Ph.D. at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiac metabolism with Dr. Heinrich Taegtmeyer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Her laboratory investigates how oncometabolic stress reshapes cardiac and skeletal muscle biology, combining in vivo stable-isotope tracing, mass spectrometry-based multi-omics, and genome-scale computational modeling to quantify metabolic flux in preclinical and translational models. Current projects examine how leukemia and clonal hematopoiesis drive cardiac remodeling, how ATP-citrate lyase and IDH1 flux govern cardiac metabolic adaptation, and how dietary composition influences cardiometabolic resilience during anthracycline chemotherapy. She developed CardioNet, the first mammalian cardiac metabolic network, as a framework for integrating multi-omics data. Dr. Karlstaedt serves as principal investigator on NHLBI- and foundation-funded studies aimed at identifying targetable metabolic vulnerabilities at the intersection of cancer and cardiovascular disease.