Faculty Labs

Dr. Fadi G. Akar, Ph.D. completed his doctoral degree in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and his post-doctoral training in molecular cardiology at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Akar joined the Faculty in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 2004, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2007 and Yale University School of Medicine in 2020. Dr. Akar's laboratory is dedicated to uncovering the mechanisms that promote arrhythmias in common structural heart diseases and to develop novel gene-based approaches to prevent these malignant arrhythmias.

Dr. Burg is a clinical psychologist whose research concerns the contribution of stress and emotional factors to incident cardiovascular disease and prognosis, the pathophysiology underlying this risk, and the development and testing of behavioral interventions to mitigate this risk. His focus includes patients at risk for hypertension, and those with ischemic heart disease, cardiac arrhythmia, and congestive heart failure, and his work is funded by both the NIH and the Veterans Administration.

Jeptha P. Curtis, MD, is a Professor in the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. He received his medical degree from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons before training in internal medicine at the Duke University Medical Center and completing his fellowships in clinical and interventional cardiology at Yale. Dr. Curtis directs the American College of Cardiology Analytic Center at CORE. He has also led the development of registry-based outcome measures for CMS examining 30-day mortality following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and ICD and currently oversees the maintenance of the registry measures, contributes to the development of new measures, and assists in the development of approaches to cardiovascular surveillance. Currently, he is conducting a mixed methods research study of hospitals that perform PCI (TOP PCI). The study will begin with a qualitative component in which top performing hospitals will be visited to identify candidate strategies, and will then move to a quantitative survey of PCI hospitals to determine which strategies are most closely associated with better patient outcomes. Through critically examining the practice of interventional cardiology, Dr. Curtis hopes to improve the quality of care delivered to patients with coronary artery disease and those undergoing PCI.

Dr. Goldstein is a cardiologist who specializes in caring for adults with congenital heart disease and patients with congenital or acquired heart disease affecting pregnancy. Dr. Goldstein graduated with Distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine where she was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. She completed her training in Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Medicine, and Adult Congenital Heart Disease at Duke University Medical Center. During her fellowships, Dr. Goldstein also completed specialized training in Cardio-Obstetrics that included multidisciplinary collaboration in both clinical care and research.  Dr. Goldstein’s research focuses on improving the effectiveness of preconception counseling for patients with complex cardiac disease.

Dr. Hwa received his medical degree (First Class Honors) from the University of Sydney, Australia. He completed his Residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship in Cardiology at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, Australia. He then pursued further studies in the Department of Molecular Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation during which time he completed his doctoral thesis through Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Hwa was then awarded a Howard Hughes Physician Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue studies at M.I.T in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, H. Gobind Khorana. He joined the faculty At Dartmouth (Pharmacology and Toxicology and Medicine) in 2000, and moved to Yale (Section of Cardiovascular Medicine) in 2009.

I am a physician-scientist in the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine. My research laboratory studies the role of endothelial cells, the cells that line blood vessels, in solid organ transplant rejection. In this endeavor, we have developed novel, patient-centered protocols heavily incorporating human biospecimens to increase the likelihood that findings derived from these assays will be clinically relevant.

Harlan Krumholz is a cardiologist and scientist at Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital. He is the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine. He is a leading expert in the science to improve the quality and efficiency of care, eliminate disparities and promote equity, improve integrity and transparency in medical research, engage patients in their care, and avoid wasteful practices. Recent efforts are focused on harnessing the digital transformation in healthcare to accelerate knowledge generation and facilitate the delivery of care aligned with each patient’s needs and preferences. Dr. Krumholz is director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), an organization dedicated to improving health and health care through research, tools, and practices that produce discovery, heighten accountability, and promote better public health and clinical care. He co-founded and co-leads the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project, designed to increase access to clinical research data and promote their use to generate new knowledge. He also co-founded and co-leads medRxiv, a non-profit preprint server for the medical and health sciences. He was a founding faculty co-director of the Yale Center for Research Computing. Dr. Krumholz has been honored by membership in the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He was named a Distinguished Scientist of the American Heart Association and received their Award of Meritorious Achievement and their Clinical Research Prize. He served as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Krumholz received the Friendship Award from the People’s Republic of China in recognition of his collaborative efforts to develop a national cardiovascular research network and was named by the Chinese Society of Cardiology as a Top-10 Distinguished International Cardiologist for his contributions to the development of cardiovascular medicine in China. He founded the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Council and co-founded their annual conference. He was the founding editor of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes; founding editor of CardioExchange, a social media site of the publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine; and editor of Journal Watch Cardiology of the New England Journal of Medicine. He was a founding Governor of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. He is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of JACC, a pre-eminent cardiovascular medical journal. He co-founded HugoHealth, a patient-centric platform to engage people as partners in research and clinical care, facilitate the secure acquisition and movement of digital health data, and promote learning health communities. He co-founded Refactor Health, an enterprise healthcare AI-augmented health data management company. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1992, Dr. Krumholz received a BS (Biology) from Yale, an MD from Harvard Medical School, and a Masters in Health Policy and Management (SM) from the Harvard University School of Public Health. At Yale, he directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program from 1996-2017 and serves as Director Emeritus of the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program. Dr. Krumholz has published over 1500 articles and three books with an h-index of more than 230.

Alexandra J. Lansky, MD, is Professor of Medicine in the section of Cardiology at the Yale School of Medicine and a practicing cardiologist at Yale-New Haven Hospital, in New Haven, CT. Dr. Lansky joined Yale in 2010 as Director of the Yale Heart and Vascular Clinical Research Program and the Cardiovascular Research Center (YCRC), which specializes in the conduct of national and international cardiovascular clinical trials with specific expertise in the evaluation of interventional devices. She most recently received a dual appointment as Chair of Cardiovascular Research at Queen Mary University in London as part of the Yale and London based Barts Heart Center transatlantic research collaboration. From 2004 to 2010 Dr. Lansky was Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Director of Clinical Services at the Center for Interventional Vascular Therapy, a practicing cardiologist at New York-Presbyterian, and Chief Scientific Officer of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation Clinical Trials Center.Prior to that she was an interventional cardiologist on faculty at Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC, and at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, NY. She has dedicated her career to leading clinical and angiographic evaluations of more than 500 clinical trials in a broad range of ischemic cardiovascular therapeutic areas, including pharmacologic and interventional device trials, many of which are landmark trials in the field and/or leading to FDA approval in the United States. She has served as the principal investigator on numerous national and international imaging studies, device, DES and neuroprotection trials. Dr. Lansky has authored and coauthored over 500 academic peer-reviewed manuscripts in the fields of interventional cardiology, angiography, and women’s cardiovascular health. She chaired the American Heart Association Statement on Interventions in Women and most recently the Academic Research Consortium defining Neurologic Endpoints in clinical cardiovascular trials.Dr. Lansky has been recognized for her outstanding clinical research contributions with several prestigious awards including: Masters of Arts Privatim from Yale University in 2017; Thompson Reuter’s 2014 and 2016 “Most influential Scientific Minds for Clinical Medicine”; 2012 Wenger Award of Clinical Excellence in Women’s health, Visiting Professor at Fu Wai Hospital, Bejing, China and Honorary Professor, University College London.Dr. Lansky is board certified in cardiovascular diseases. A graduate of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, VA, she received her residency training in internal medicine, cardiology, and interventional cardiology at Washington Hospital Center, Washington DC. Dr. Lansky is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology,the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the Society of Cardiac Angiography and Interventions.

Dr. Mani received his M.D. from Johannes Gutenberg University in 1991 in Germany where he had begun his scientific studies in cancer research. Later that year, he arrived at Yale and worked with Dr. Fred Gorelick on pancreatic exocrine diseases in the Department of Cell Biology and Gastroenterology prior to starting his Internal Medicine residency training at Yale New Haven Hospital, which he completed in 1996 after which he was chosen as chief resident. He then pursued a cardiovascular clinical fellowship at Yale along with post-doctoral studies in the Department of Genetics under Dr. Richard Lifton, where he began his focused work on human cardiovascular genetics. He joined the faculty in the Department of Internal Medicine, Section of Cardiovascular Medicine, initially as an instructor. He was appointed to assistant professor in 2002 and promoted to professor of medicine and genetics in 2016. Dr. Mani has published his research findings in leading journals such as Science, NEJM, Cell Metab, PNAS, Nature Genetics, and others. Due to these and other scientific accomplishments, he has been invited to speak globally and has been recognized with multiple fellowships and awards, including the highly coveted NIH Outstanding Investigator Award in 2017.

Kathleen Martin, PhD, graduated from Hiram College, where she majored in Biology. She earned her PhD from Case Western Reserve University in Physiology and Biophysics, then completed postdoctoral fellowships in cell biology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Martin joined the faculty of Dartmouth Medical School in 2000 in the Section of Vascular Surgery and Department of Pharmacology where she initiated her research program studying vascular smooth muscle cell biology in cardiovascular disease. In 2009, she became an Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Yale before becoming a professor in 2019. She has held multiple leadership positions with the American Heart Association, served as an NIH charter study section member, and currently serves as a Co-Director of the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center. Dr. Martin’s research lab aims to define the cellular signaling and epigenetic mechanisms that regulated vascular smooth muscle cell function in intimal hyperplasia, atherosclerosis, and transplant vasculopathy. Understanding how smooth muscle cells dramatically alter their phenotype may provide new insights for treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease.