Current Research and Scholarly Interests
1) Heart disease in South Asians - genetic, metabolic, & behavioral underpinnings of an aggressive phenotype. Leveraging digital health to optimize lifestyle changes. I founded a preventive cardiology clinic dedicated to treating South Asian patients who have a 4x risk of early heart disease and heart-related events. The clinic, SSATHI, is a clinical and research program that tracks patient performance and utilizes a multidisciplinary strategy to lower risk levels in these high-risk patients.
2) Imaging cell injury & recovery in the heart. Designing molecular probes that track to injured heart cells where cardiac MRI can visualize signals of early cardiac injury and facilitate preventive medical therapy. I have also optimized a new imaging method for viable cells, manganese-enhanced MRI, to delineate live heart cells or transplanted stem cells. A third area of imaging research surrounds the impact of hypothermia on preservation of heart tissue after myocardial infarction, where cooling the heart and body to 5-6 degrees cooler than average protects up to 90% of at-risk heart muscle from dying.
