Chairman

Harvey Hecht, M.D.

Dr. Hecht is an expert in cardiac imaging and preventive cardiology, and is the author of more than 100 publications in peer reviewed journals. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Mount Sinai Hospital (NY) and a fellowship in Cardiology at Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School. His academic appointments have included Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Assistant Professor at UCLA, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and University of California, San Francisco, and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine . A graduate of Columbia College and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Hecht is board certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Diseases, and is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology. He is a consultant to the editors of numerous cardiovascular publications, including the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, American Journal of Cardiology, Circulation, American Heart Journal, Journal of Invasive Cardiology, and the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography. He is one of the founders of, and was the first President of the Society of Atherosclerosis Imaging, as well as one of the founders of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography. He has been involved in early stage development of several startup companies in the medical arena which have had successful IPO’s. Dr. Hecht is the Chairman of the Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Daniel Berman, M.D.

Dr. Berman is a world-renowned expert in nuclear cardiology and cardiac CT. He is Director of Cardiac Imaging and of Nuclear Cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine. He received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco and completed residencies in internal medicine and nuclear medicine at University of California (UC), Davis. His fellowship in cardiology was also at UC Davis Medical Center. Dr. Berman is Board certified in internal medicine, cardiology and nuclear medicine.

Dr. Berman serves on national and international committees of numerous professional organizations and their editorial boards. Recognized as one of the principal developers of the techniques and applications of nuclear cardiology, he has lectured extensively worldwide. In addition he has authored over 200 original manuscripts, chapters, and books. He has been awarded numerous grants and continues to lead the specialty of cardiac imaging in generating outcome data for cost-effective analysis of cardiac imaging tests. Dr. Berman is a member of the Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Matthew Budoff, M.D.

Dr. Budoff is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Medicine. He is also program director for the Division of Cardiology and director of the cardiac CT laboratory at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, CA.

Dr. Budoff’s research interests focus on preventive cardiology, including risk factor identification and modification. He has done extensive research involving the use of the electron beam CT to identify patients at high risk for cardiovascular events, progression of heart disease, and non-invasive angiography. He is the author of over 150 articles, reviews, editorials and book chapters. Dr. Budoff is an investigator in multiple, large pharmaceutical trials and multicenter studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. His work now focuses on the progression of subclinical atherosclerosis and its associated outcomes, as well as non-invasive CT angiography.

Dr. Budoff is a founder and executive member of the Society of Atherosclerosis Imaging and the Society of Cardiovascular CT, chairman of the CT and MR credentialing committee for the American College Cardiology and a member of the American Heart Association Cardiovascular Imaging and Intervention Committee. Dr. Budoff is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Matthew Burg, Ph.D.

Dr. Burg is Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Section of General Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and core faculty in the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health there.  He received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology at West Virginia University in 1984, and completed postdoctoral training in cardiovascular behavioral medicine at Duke University Medical School in 1986.  Dr. Burg has received continuous funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for the past 20 years, and has conducted seminal research on the role of stress and emotional factors in CHD.  His particular research focus has been on mental stress provoked myocardial ischemia, identifying the prognostic significance of this phenomenon and the importance of anger and impaired coronary flow reserve in its pathophysiology.  He has also conducted several behavior randomized clinical trials in cardiac populations, serving as site-PI for the NHLBI funded ENRICHD clinical trial, which focused on depression treatment in post-ACS patients, and overall PI for a stress reduction trial in ICD patients. Dr. Burg is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Stephane Carlier, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Carlier is the former Director of Intravascular Imaging & Physiology at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation and is currently Director of Clinical Cardiology at Cordis, Johnson & Johnson, Belgium. A recognized innovator in the field of biomedical engineering, Dr. Carlier previously worked as an interventional cardiologist in the Cardiovascular Centre in Aalst, Belgium, where he was in charge of the intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) laboratory. Dr. Carlier also worked in the catheterization laboratory at the Thoraxcentre, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, for 5 years and took part in the pioneering European clinical trials on drug-eluting stents and brachytherapy. Dr. Carlier completed medical school in 1991 at the Free University of Brussels. His internship, residency and cardiology training were performed at the St. Pierre University Hospital, also in Brussels. In 2000, Dr. Carlier defended his thesis on new processing methods of IVUS images for his PhD in bioengineering, which he earned at the Thoraxcentre, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Dr. Carlier is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Erling Falk, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Falk is a distinguished, world renowned cardiovascular pathologist who has made several discoveries related to the underlying cause of heart attack. He was among the first to shed light on the role of plaque rupture in precipitating fatal myocardial infarction and sudden cardiac death. Dr. Falk has authored hundreds of journal manuscripts and book chapters. His research team in Aarhus University (Denmark) is developing new methods for early detection of atherosclerotic plaques that are vulnerable to rupture and cause heart attack. Dr. Falk is a collaborator of Dr. Naghavi and a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Craig J. Hartley, Ph.D.

Dr. Hartley received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970, and then came to Houston for a postdoctoral fellowship in Bioengineering at Rice University. Since 1973 he has been with Baylor College of Medicine where he is currently a Professor of Medicine in the Section of Cardiovascular Sciences. He is also an adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Rice and of Electrical Engineering at the University of Houston, and is the director of the Instrumentation Development Core Laboratory of the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center. Since 1968 he has been active in the development of ultrasonic methods to measure blood flow and cardiovascular function in patients and in animal models of human diseases. Dr. Hartley is principal investigator on several research grants and has received a Research Career Development Award and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. In 1993 he received the Laufman Prize for career achievement from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. Dr. Hartley is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and since 1973 has served on an NIH study section that reviews Small Business Grants. Dr. Hartley is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Ioannis A. Kakadiaris, Ph.D.

Dr. Kakadiaris is the founder and Director of University of Houston's Computational Biomedicine Laboratory and the Director of the Division of Bio-Computation at the UH Institute for Digital Informatics and Analysis.  Dr. Kakadiaris (www.cbl.uh.edu/~ioannisk) is a recognized expert in the area of biomedical image analysis and cardiovascular informatics.

Currently, he is working on the analysis of CT and IVUS data for the detection of the vulnerable patient and he serves as an advisor to the SHAPE task force.  He is the recipient of the year 2000 NSF Early Career Development Award, UH Computer Science Research Excellence Award, UH Enron Teaching Excellence Award, the Schlumberger Technical Foundation Award and the James Muller VP Young Investigator Prize for his CT work on vulnerable plaque.

Ioannis Kakadiaris joined the University of Houston in August 1997 after completing a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston. Dr. Kakadiaris is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Stanley Kleis, Ph.D.

Dr. Kleis is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston. Dr. Kleis, who holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, has worked with NASA for nearly 20 years to enhance the functionality of its bioreactors. He was principle investigator on two space shuttle flight experiments and received one of NASA’s highest honors, the Public Service Medal.  He has expertise in fluid mechanics and heat and mass transport with emphasis on experimental measurements and applied computational fluid dynamics. Dr. Kleis is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Roxana Mehran, M.D.

Dr. Mehran is the Director of Clinical Research and the Data Coordinating & Analysis Center at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation and a practicing interventional cardiologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Mehran spent several years as an interventional cardiologist before becoming Director of Clinical Research at the Cardiology Research Foundation at the Washington Hospital Center. She later relocated to New York to assume her current post. Dr. Mehran has a long-standing research interest in cardiovascular topics, including intravascular ultrasound, angioplasty and coronary stenting, and has written over 200 publications on these topics as well as a chapter, "Coronary Heart Disease," in the book "Principles and Practice of Interventional Cardiology".

Dr. Mehran has participated in a variety of national committees. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and Interventional Cardiology. She is an elected fellow of five major Associations including the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Chest Physicians, and the European Society of Cardiology. Dr. Mehran is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Ralph Metcalfe, Ph.D.

Dr. Metcalfe received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Washington, his M. S. in mathematics from M. I. T. and his PhD in applied mathematics from M. I. T. with Professor Steven Orszag. After completing his graduate studies, he worked for 12 years as a research scientist at Flow Research Company in Seattle, Washington. In 1987, he joined the faculty at the University of Houston where he is presently professor of mechanical engineering and mathematics.

Recently, his work has focused on numerical simulations of blood flow in normal and diseased carotid arteries to investigate the role of fluid dynamic parameters such as wall shear stress and vortex generation on the formation of atherosclerotic lesions. In conjunction with surgeons at the Texas Heart Institute, Dr. Metcalfe has also investigated numerically the fluid dynamical consequences of implantation of a new type of Ventricular Assist Device.

Recently, Dr. Metcalfe was appointed chair of the National Institutes of Health Cardiovascular Devices Study Section.

Dr. Metcalfe is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Arshed Quyyumi, M.D.

Dr. Quyyumi currently serves as a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology, Emory University School of Medicine. After completing a degree in pharmacology in London, Dr. Quyyumi completed medical school and residency training at the Guy's and Royal Free Hospitals in London. After a cardiology fellowship there as well, he completed his sub-specialty training at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. From 1986-2001, he served in several capacities at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, including: chief resident of cardiology, Senior Investigator, and Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory. Since 2001, he has served in his present position at Emory. He has been published in over 150 peer-review articles related to the pathogenesis and vascular biology of atherosclerosis, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of American College of Cardiology, American Journal of Cardiology and others. He currently has several ongoing research initiatives, including a unique NIH-funded Emory-Morehouse partnership to reduce cardiovascular disparities, studies designed to understand mechanisms underlying control of vascular tone, and progenitor cell biology and therapy in cardiovascular diseases. Dr. Quyyumi is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

John Rumberger, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Rumberger is recognized as the world's leading authority on cardiac and vascular imaging using EBT and CT Scanning. His notable credentials make him uniquely qualified to provide interpretation of Coronary CT Angiography. Dr. Rumberger has been Professor of Medicine and Consultant in the Department of Cardiovascular Diseases at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dr. Rumberger received his doctorate in engineering from The Ohio State University in 1976 and graduated from the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1978. During his over 20 year career as a clinician, educator, and researcher, Dr. Rumberger has published nearly 500 scientific papers and book chapters. He has lectured worldwide on EBT, early disease diagnosis, and wellness. He is an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association and a Founding Member of the International Society of Atherosclerosis Imaging. Dr Rumberger is an active Reviewer for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Archives of Internal Medicine, publications of both the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Rumberger is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.

Hirofumi Tanaka, Ph.D.

Dr. Tanaka is an associate professor and the director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a B.A. in physical education at the International Martial Arts University in Japan, a M.S. in Bioenergetics from Ball State University, and a Ph.D. in applied physiology from the University of Tennessee. Dr. Tanaka’s research interests revolve around preventive cardiology and preventive gerontology, with primary research interests involving habitual exercise, aging, and vascular function. He has published over 100 original research articles. He is an elected fellow of various professional organizations including the American Heart Association, the American College of Sports Medicine, the Gerontological Society of America, and the Society for Geriatric Cardiology. Dr. Tanaka is a member of Endothelix Scientific Advisory Board.