Bio
A close colleague of Dr. Andreas R. Gruentzig, Dr. Simon H. Stertzer performed the first percutaneous coronary angioplasty in the United States on March 1, 1978. Over his fifty-nine-year career, Dr. Stertzer pioneered the subspecialty of Interventional Cardiology, performing early complex angioplasty, and developing innovative technologies such as sheathless coronary stents, rotational atherectomy, transplant molecular diagnostics, and most recently, trans-endocardial autologous stem cell implantation in heart failure and chronic ischemic cardiomyopathy. During his career he has authored over 140 articles published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide. In the course of Dr. Stertzer’s career, he was instrumental in the founding of several medical technology companies, including Arterial Vascular Engineering, Quanam Medical, BioCardia, and Avenda Health. Dr. Stertzer has endowed two Stanford University professorships in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and one in the Cardiovascular Institute. He has funded fellowships in the BioDesign program at Stanford, and an undergraduate named scholarship at the New York University School of Medicine.
