Clinical Associate

Khawar Gul, M.D.

Dr. Khawar Gul is a Clinical Cardiology Fellow at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He has spent several years in research on detection of vulnerable plaques with Drs. Morteza Naghavi, Ward Casscells, and James Willerson at the Texas Heart Institute and the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston where he also completed his residency in Internal Medicine. Jointly with Dr. Ioannis Kakadaiaris, Dr. Gul earned the AEHA James Muller Award for New Investigator in Clinical Research in 2003.

His ongoing research projects with Drs. Budoff and Naghavi include noninvasive assessment of endothelial function. Dr. Gul is also a co-founder of Endothelix.

Research Associates

Naser Ahmadi, M.D.

Dr. Ahmadi received his medical degree from Isfahan University in Iran. During his medical training, he has contributed to numerous research projects, including Non-Communicable Disease projects of the World Health Organization (2003-2005). In 2006, Dr. Ahmadi joined Drs. Naghavi and Budoff in VENDYS studies at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, CA. His outstanding contributions to the design, conducting, analysis, and publication of VENDYS clinical studies have brought him to the forefront of the VENDYS research team. Dr. Ahmadi has authored numerous publications and presented VENDYS findings at national medical conferences. He is also reviewer for prestigious cardiology journals such as Circulation. Dr. Ahmadi is pursuing an academic career in medicine as a cardiovascular specialist and researcher. He is currently a Joint Research Fellow at Harbor UCLA and at VA Loma Linda under the supervision of Dr. Gary Foster, Director of the Cardiovascular Computed Tomography laboratories.

Wasy Akhtar, M.S.

Wasy is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston. He received a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Houston. His master’s thesis focused on numerical simulations of a vapor bubble approaching a heated inclined wall. Wasy has been working in the area of numerical methods and computational fluid dynamics, in particular on problems involving interface tracking with phase change models. As a part of Endothelix’s research team, he is currently investigating the relationship between reactive hyperemia and DTM through numerical simulations and is trying to better characterize DTM signals.

Mandeep Dhindsa, M.D., M.A.

Dr. Dhindsa received a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (M.B.B.S) degree from Sawai Man Singh Medical College, Jaipur, India in 2000. He worked as an attending physician for 4 years and then went to The University of Texas at Austin to pursue a master’s degree. He received his M.A. in 2008 while working under the guidance of Dr Hirofumi Tanaka at the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory and is performing his Ph.D. studies in the same laboratory.

Robert Schier, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Schier is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Schier received his M.D. degree from the University of Bochum, Germany, in 2007. A year later, he defended his thesis on the effects of Sirolimus on wound healing for his PhD in medicine, which he earned at the Surgical Center of the Knappschaft University Hospital of Bochum. Dr. Schier’s research interests focus on cardiovascular risk prediction within the perioperative anesthesia care, including cardiopulmonary exercise testing and endothelial function studies. He has done extensive research involving the use of cardiopulmonary exercise testing to identify patients at high risk for cardiovascular, pulmonary and wound healing events in order to improve perioperative outcome. He has been involved in several clinical studies on inadequate mobilization of endothelial progenitor cells following exercise and surgical injury as a predictor of poor postoperative outcome. In 2009, Dr. Schier will be continuing his residency program in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Cologne, Germany and will be collaborating with Endothelix as an Academic Research Associate in Europe.