Heart Failure, Cardiac Transplant, and Mechanical Circulatory Support
The Heart Failure, Cardiac Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support affinity group at Stanford consists of a group of physicians who specialize in a variety of subspecialties of heart failure management and work in an integrated manner with nurses, dietitians, pharmacists, and social workers to provide highly specialized and comprehensive care to patients with heart failure, and offer cardiac transplantation and mechanical circulatory support for those with end-stage disease.
Heart Failure Clinics
The Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease is led by Dr. Euan Ashley and encompasses a diverse group of physicians and genetic counselors who treat patients with genetic myopathies such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia, channelopathies and Marfan syndrome. The group has now become the largest hypertrophic cardiomyopathy center west of the Rockies.
The Stanford Amyloid Center is headed by Dr. Ronald Witteles who works in close collaboration with his colleagues in hematology to provide comprehensive evaluation and care for patients with amyloid heart disease. Dr. Witteles also specializes in the treatment of patients with cardiac sarcoidosis and chemotherapy-related cardiomyopathy.
The Stanford Heart Failure clinic provides care to patients with advanced heart failure and evaluates patients for cardiac transplantation and mechanical circulatory support. The multidisciplinary clinic provides longitudinal care and collaborates with colleagues in electrophysiology, the structural heart program, cardiac surgery and the adult congenital heart disease program.
Stanford is also has a Center for Undiagnosed Diseases that is part of the multi-institutional Undiagnosed Disease Network funded through the National Institutes of Health. It is a multi-disciplinary research center focused on diagnosing rare and unknown diseases utilizing whole genome sequencing.
Cardiac Transplantation
The field of heart transplantation started in the 1960s at Stanford with initial experiments by Norman Shumway and culminated in the first heart transplant in the United States in 1968. In 2018 the program will celebrate the 50th anniversary of this landmark event. In addition to being the first heart transplant center in the United States, it has also made several landmark contributions to the field, including development of the endomyocardial biopsy, the development of a biopsy grading scheme, the introduction of cold preservation, the first heart-lung transplant and the development of intravascular ultrasound to assess for cardiac allograft vasculopathy.
Other major advances in the field of heart transplantation pioneered by clinicians and investigators at Stanford include the recognition of the role of cytomegalovirus infection in the development of chronic rejection, the use of peripheral gene expression testing for non-invasive rejection surveillance, and most recently, the development of a novel cell-free DNA assay for early detection of graft injury.
Stanford remains a leader in the field of heart failure and heart transplantation, and is proud that its trainees hold distinguished leadership positions at transplant centers around the world.
Mechanical Circulatory Support
Stanford has a long history of involvement in the field of mechanical circulatory support, dating to 1984 with the implantation of the Novacor LVAD as a bridge to transplantation. Dr. Will Hiesinger is the Surgical Director and Dr. Jeffrey Teuteberg is the Medical Director of the mechanical circulatory support program. Stanford continues to be closely involved in device-based trials as well as center-initiated investigations. The program implants about 25 VADs a year as both bridge to transplantation and destination therapy. The majority of the implants are with the HeartMate3 (Abbott, US) and HVAD (Medtronic, US) using both a median sternotomy and, increasingly, a lateral thoracotomy approach.
Advanced Heart Failure Transplant Cardiology (AHFTC) Fellowship Program
The Heart Failure Transplant fellowship program was established in 1989, received ACGME accreditation in 2013 and currently accepts three fellows per year.
Faculty
Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Dr. Alexander is an advanced heart failure-trained cardiologist. He is also an Assistant Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. Alexander specializes in the management of advanced heart failure and transplant cases, seeing a wide range of patients. He also has an active research laboratory, studying various forms of heart failure.
Dr. Alexander has expertise in diagnosing and treating transthyretin cardiac amyloidosis, a critical yet underdiagnosed cause of heart failure among African Americans and the elderly. He is conducting extensive research to enhance our understanding of this condition, with grant support from the National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association, among other sources.
Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor of Genomics and Precision Health, Arthur L. Bloomfield Professor of Medicine and Professor of Genetics, of Biomedical Data Science and, by courtesy, of Pathology
Bio
Euan Ashley graduated with first class Honors in Physiology and Medicine from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He completed medical residency and a PhD (DPhil) at the University of Oxford before moving to Stanford University in California where he studied genetics, data science, and completed subspecialty training in cardiovascular medicine. Dr Ashley is currently Chair of the Department of Medicine, Stanford's largest department with 15 divisions and over 800 faculty.
Dr Ashley’s research is focused on the science of precision medicine. In 2010, he led the team that carried out the first clinical interpretation of a human genome. Over the following years, his team built tools to analyze the genomes of the first patient family sequenced, completed the first whole genome molecular autopsy, made the first genetic diagnosis using long read sequencing, and helped establish genome sequencing as a routine part of the care of patients worldwide. In 2022, he led a collaborative team to set a Guinness World Record for the speed of sequencing a human genome, completing the variant calling in five hours and making genetic diagnoses in critically ill patients in just over seven hours — less than half the time of the previous record.
Dr Ashley’s work in data science, artificial intelligence, and digital health has also broken boundaries. He leads the My Heart Counts Cardiovascular Health Study. Launched in collaboration with Apple in 2015, the application was the fastest recruiting medical study in history. More recently, his team works on artificial intelligence across multiple scales: Generative protein and DNA models direct design of novel genetic therapies; cellular morphology models define cellular phenotypes; multimodal models augment physician decision making in the clinic; generative models individualize behavioral health interventions for physical activity at population scale.
Dr Ashley co-directs Stanford’s biomedical innovation-translation program, Catalyst, which invests in Stanford’s most promising biomedical innovations. Since 2012, Dr Ashley has co-founded 7 biotechnology companies. He is a non-executive director of the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca where he chairs the Board Science Committee.
Dr Ashley has received national and international recognition for his work including the NIH New Innovator Award, the American Heart Association (AHA) National Innovation Award and the Medal of Honor. He was recognized by the Obama White House for contributions to Personalized Medicine and worked with President Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy on programs including the Precision Medicine Initiative (All Of Us) and the Frontiers science and technology conference. In 2023, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his exceptional scholarship and promise.
Dr Ashley’s first popular science book The Genome Odyssey was released in 2021. Favorably reviewed by the international press including the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, it has been translated into multiple languages and distributed globally.
Father to three Americans, Dr. Ashley spends his free time piloting small planes, mountain biking, and playing soccer. A devoted—some might say obsessive—follower of Liverpool Football Club, he also spends time tending to his special research program focused on the health benefits of single malt Scotch whisky.
Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular), Emeritus
Bio
Dr. Michael Fowler is a Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford Hospital & Clinics.
Dr. Fowler attended the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, London, England. He has been elected to be a fellow in the Royal College of Physicians. He came to Stanford University on a British Heart Foundation, American Heart Association reciprocal fellowship award.
Dr. Fowler was appointed to the faculty in 1982. He is former Medical Director of the Heart Failure Program at Stanford University School of Medicine and Medical Director of the Stanford Cardiomyopathy Center.
Dr. Fowler has specialized in the treatment and research related to heart failure for over 35 years. He played an important role in the development of beta blocking drugs to treat heart failure and has also participated in most and the major studies that have led to our current comprehensive treatment for heart failure with drugs and devices. He is an expert in evaluating patients who may benefit from cardiac transplantation or mechanical support therapy.
Clinical Associate Professor, Medicine - Cardiovascular Medicine
Bio
Dr. Gerber is a critical care cardiologist and medical director of Stanford's cardiac ICU. He has dual subspecialty training in cardiovascular and critical care medicine and additional board certification in echocardiography. He completed his residency in internal medicine, fellowship in cardiovascular medicine, and an additional fellowship in critical care medicine at Stanford University and joined as faculty in 2021 as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine’s Division of Cardiovascular Medicine.
Dr. Gerber manages the full spectrum of heart and vascular conditions with a focus on critically ill patients with life-threatening cardiovascular disease. He is active in medical education, teaching introductory echocardiography to Stanford medical students and residents, co-directing the Stanford Critical Care Medicine Critical Care Ultrasound Program, and lecturing nationally on critical care echocardiography and point-of-care ultrasonography at the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s annual congress. Finally, Dr. Gerber’s research interests focus on optimizing cardiac intensive care, including working with the Critical Care Cardiology Trials Network (CCCTN) - a national network of tertiary cardiac ICUs coordinated by the TIMI Study Group - and studying acute mechanical circulatory support techniques to improve patient outcomes and care processes.
Clinical Professor, Medicine - Cardiovascular Medicine
Bio
Dr. Francois Haddad, MD is a Clinical Professor of Medicine that specializes in the field of cardio-vascular imaging, pulmonary hypertension, advanced heart failure and transplantation. Dr. Haddad has over 18 years of practice in the field of cardiology. He directs Stanford Cardiovascular Institute Biomarker and Phenotypic Core Laboratory dedicated to translational studies in cardiovascular medicine. The laboratory focuses on (1) identifying early biomarkers of heart failure and aging, (2) bioengineering approaches to cardiovascular disease modeling and (3) novel informatic approach for the detection and risk stratification of disease. He is involved is several precision medicine initiatives in health including the Project Baseline, the Integrated Personalized Omics Profiling Initiative, the Athletic screening program at Stanford and the Strong-D cardiac rehabilitation initiative in individuals with diabetes mellitus.
Clinical Assistant Professor, Medicine - Cardiovascular Medicine
Bio
Dr. Stephanie Hsiao is a clinical assistant professor at Stanford Medicine and a full-time advanced heart failure/transplant cardiologist at the Palo Alto VA. She is the associate program director of the Stanford Cardiology Fellowship and the site director of Palo Alto VA. She grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She attended undergraduate at UC Berkeley and obtained her Master’s degree in Pharmacology at Cambridge University in the UK. She obtained her M.D. from UC San Francisco. She completed her Internal Medicine residency and General Cardiology fellowship at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, where she served as the chief resident and chief cardiology fellow. She completed her advanced heart failure/transplant cardiology fellowship at Stanford in June 2022 and joined the Stanford Faculty soon after. She has a strong interest in medical education and quality improvement. Her clinical interests include HF outreach in the VA health care systems, cardiology fellowship curriculum design/development and humanism in medicine. Her research interests include multi-organ transplantations, advanced HF therapies for the underserved and CardioPalliative integration. She plans to lead a career in medical education and quality improvement to deliver exceptional and equitable care for patients needing advanced HF therapies.
Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) at the Stanford University Medical Center, Emerita
Assistant Professor of Medicine (BMIR)
Bio
Daniel Katz is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) and the Cardiovascular Medicine Divisions. He practices as an Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiologist. He completed internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, general cardiology training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and then joined Stanford in 2021 for his advanced heart failure training. His research focuses on identifying the various pathophysiologic patterns and mechanisms that lead to the heterogeneous syndrome of heart failure. His efforts leverage high dimensional data in many forms including clinical phenotypes, plasma proteomics, metabolomics, and genetics. He is presently engaged in analysis of multi-omic data from the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) and the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Program. His clinical interests include advanced heart failure, transplant cardiology, and mechanical circulatory support.
Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Dr. Kawana joined the Advanced Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiology group in 2018. He completed his internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, and heart failure training at Stanford. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship under Dr. James Spudich in the Department of Biochemistry. He is the Medical Director of Ambulatory Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathy Service in the Advanced Heart Failure program. He manages advanced heart failure patients in the clinic, CCU/heart failure service, and post-heart transplant/MCS service. His research interests are in the fundamental mechanism of inherited cardiomyopathies, and he studies the effect of gene mutation on the cardiac sarcomere function using cutting-edge biochemical and biophysical approaches, which would lead to the development of novel pharmacotherapy that directly modulates cardiac muscle protein. He is involved in multiple clinical trials for pharmacotherapy and novel device studies in heart failure and inherited cardiomyopathy.
Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Dr. Kiran Kaur Khush is a board-certified, fellowship-trained heart failure cardiologist at Stanford Health Care. Dr. Khush is also a professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. Khush specializes in caring for patients with advanced heart failure and those needing a heart transplant or mechanical circulatory support. She is dedicated to delivering patient-centered, compassionate care and improving quality of life for people with heart failure.
Dr. Khush’s research interests include developing evidence-based guidelines for evaluating and accepting donor hearts for transplantation. She also studies novel ways to monitor for and prevent early and long-term complications after heart transplantation.
Dr. Khush has coauthored more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Science Translational Medicine, and The Lancet. She has also presented to her peers at international and national meetings, including annual sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) and the American Society of Transplantation.
Throughout her career, Dr. Khush has been an active member of the ISHLT and has served on many of the organization’s committees.
Associate Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Dr. Parikh is a clinician scientist who cares for patients with and studies inherited (genetic) cardiovascular disease. She is the director of the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease (SCICD) which is one of the largest of its kind in the country. SCICD integrates clinical and basic science with the expert care of patients with genetic cardiovascular conditions (e.g., cardiomyopathies, arrhythmias and vascular diseases). It provides cutting edge care for thousands of patients and families across the lifespan and integrates medical, surgical and genetics care. Our team includes physicians, nurses, advanced practice providers, genetic counselors, exercise physiologists and scientists.
Dr. Parikh's own clinical practice and laboratory are focused on the genetics of cardiomyopathies and their associated arrhythmogenic substrates. She completed clinical cardiology fellowship at Stanford School of Medicine and her medical residency at the University of California, San Francisco. Funded by multiple research grants from the NIH, her lab seeks to identify novel mechanisms and therapeutic technologies for genetic cardiomyopathy as well as better understand the natural histories of patients affected by these diseases.
Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Karim Sallam, MD, is trained in Cardiovascular Medicine and Advanced Heart Failure.
Assistant Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research Center)
Bio
Alex Sandhu, MD, MS is a cardiologist with a special interest in the care of patients with advanced heart failure. He graduated from the seven-year combined BA-MD program at Northwestern with a focus on economics and mathematics. He completed an internal medicine residency at Stanford University, spending 16 weeks at Makerere Hospital in Uganda as part of the Global Health track. He subsequently earned a Masters in Health Services Research at Stanford while acting as a fellow in health services research at the Palo Alto VA and Stanford's Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research. Next, he completed fellowships in cardiology and advanced heart failure and transplant at Stanford before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Stanford Cardiology and the Stanford Prevention Research Center.
Alex is now an active clinician and clinical researcher who focuses on the implementation of high-value preventive strategies, comparative effectiveness, innovative clinical trial design, and health economics. He is passionate about testing patient-centered implementation strategies to bring meaningful improvements to patients’ lives and prevent disease morbidity. He is involved in several clinical trials including the K-23 funded PRO-HF (patient-centered quality of life assessments), DOT-HF (digital health study for HF patient activation), a CAC notification pilot trial (patient-centered coronary artery calcification notification), and PHARM-HF (testing strategies to improve HF management by pharmacists).
In his free time, he enjoys playing soccer as well as entertaining and being entertained by his joyful kids, Kyle, Tyler, and Kira.
Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
He is currently a Professor of Medicine at Stanford where he serves as the Associate Chief of Cardiology and Section Chief of Heart Failure, Cardiac Transplantation, and Mechanical Circulatory Support. He sees patients both in the clinic and in the hospital who have advanced heart failure or who have received cardiac transplantation or mechanical circulatory support.
His research interests are in clinical outcomes in patients after transplant and mechanical support as well as novel approaches to immunosuppression. He has participated in many single-center and multi-institutional research studies and has published widely in the fields of transplant and mechanical support. He served as President of the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation in 2018.
Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular)
Bio
Board certified in Internal Medicine, General Cardiology, Interventional Cardiology, and Heart Failure and Transplantation. Medical Director of Stanford Cardiac Care Unit since 1991. Clinical interests: CHF, advanced structural heart disease (heart muscle, coronary artery, valve, and pericardial), as well as post radiation and chemotherapy induced heart damage.
Associate Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Dr Wheeler is a physician scientist with interests in cardiomyopathies, rare and undiagnosed diseases, therapeutics and genomics. He has experience treating patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, neuromuscular disease associated cardiomyopathies including adults with Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies, myotonic dystrophy, limb girdle muscular dystrophies, inherited dilated cardiomyopathies, advanced heart failure, mechanical circulatory support/LVADs, heart and multiorgan transplant, and competitive athletes with cardiac disease. He is Director of the Stanford Center for Undiagnosed Diseases, a clinical site of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network..He has extensive translational science efforts, as site PI for clinical trials for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and dilated cardiomyopathy and for cardiomyopathy consortia including NONCOMPACT, PPCM and the Precision Medicine Study/DCM Consortium. He is Co-PI of the GREGoR Stanford Site, a research center of the GREGoR Consortium, and Co-PI of the NIH-funded Bioinformatics Center of the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium. His laboratory efforts focus on advancing diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in ultrarare diseases, with a focus on iPSC models, RNA-based diagnostics and therapeutics. He pursues projects and collaborations at the intersection of rare disease genetics, genomics, therapeutics and clinical investigation.
Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine)
Bio
Dr. Ronald Witteles is a Cardiologist who specializes in the treatment of patients with Heart Failure. He has particular expertise in the treatment of Amyloidosis, Sarcoidosis, and cardiac complications of cancer therapy (sometimes called "CardioOncology"). He serves as Co-Director of the Stanford Amyloid Center, one of the world's leading centers for the care of patients with amyloidosis, and serves as Co-Director of the Stanford Multidisciplinary Sarcoidosis Program. He is an Associate Editor for JACC: CardioOncology, the world's leading journal dedicated to the field of CardioOncology. Dr. Witteles has published extensively in his areas of expertise, and has won many awards for his excellence in both patient care and education.
Dr. Witteles serves as Program Director for the Stanford Internal Medicine residency program -- directly supervising the training of more than 140 physicians each year. He was recognized by Stanford in 2020 with the award for 'Program Director of the Year'. He holds board certification in Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Disease, and Advanced Heart Failure/Transplant Cardiology.
Administrative Staff
Associate to Dr. Petra Mamic
Tawny Bagnol
Associate to Drs. Kevin Alexander, Kiran Khush, Karim Sallam, and Ronald Witteles
Associate to Dr. Jeffrey Teuteberg
Terra Coakley
Program Manager, Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease and Community Events Manager
Brooke Gazzoli
Associate to Drs. Euan Ashley, Victoria Parikh, and Matthew Wheeler
Aya Golan
Associate to Dr. Francois Haddad
Cassandra Hawthorne
Associate to Dr. Eldrin Lewis
Associate to Dr. Stephanie Hsiao
Associate to Dr. Aly Elezaby
Angela Valdez
Associate to Drs. Masataka Kawana, Joyce Njoroge, Randall Vagelos, and Anubodh Sunny Varshney