Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professor
Rockefeller University
New York, N.Y.
Jan L. Breslow heads the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at The Rockefeller University, where he investigates genetic and environmental factors involved in atherosclerosis susceptibility.
Over the past 25 years, Dr. Breslow has identified many of the genes that control the transport of cholesterol and other fats through the bloodstream and has shown that some forms of these genes predispose individuals to atherosclerosis, while others protect against the disease. His creation of the apolipoprotein E knockout mouse provided the first good small animal model of atherosclerosis and has opened up many new experimental approaches for the study of this disease.
In recent years, Dr. Breslow has applied genomic techniques to mouse models to identify new sets of genes that act in the immune system and in the blood vessel wall to control atherosclerosis susceptibility, as well as genes that influence a person’s response to high cholesterol diets.
Dr. Breslow received A.B. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed an internship and residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, and was then a staff associate at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, before returning to Harvard and Children’s Hospital in 1973.
He joined The Rockefeller University in 1984, where he holds the Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professorship. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, Dr. Breslow is a former president of the American Heart Association.
His numerous honors include the American Academy of Pediatrics E. Mead Johnson Award, the Heinrich Wieland Prize in Lipid Research, the American Heart Association Basic Research Prize, the Pasarow Foundation Cardiovascular Research Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Cardiovascular Research, and the New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology.
Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professor
Rockefeller University
New York, N.Y.
Jan L. Breslow heads the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at The Rockefeller University, where he investigates genetic and environmental factors involved in atherosclerosis susceptibility.
Over the past 25 years, Dr. Breslow has identified many of the genes that control the transport of cholesterol and other fats through the bloodstream and has shown that some forms of these genes predispose individuals to atherosclerosis, while others protect against the disease. His creation of the apolipoprotein E knockout mouse provided the first good small animal model of atherosclerosis and has opened up many new experimental approaches for the study of this disease.
In recent years, Dr. Breslow has applied genomic techniques to mouse models to identify new sets of genes that act in the immune system and in the blood vessel wall to control atherosclerosis susceptibility, as well as genes that influence a person’s response to high cholesterol diets.
Dr. Breslow received A.B. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed an internship and residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston, and was then a staff associate at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, before returning to Harvard and Children’s Hospital in 1973.
He joined The Rockefeller University in 1984, where he holds the Frederick Henry Leonhardt Professorship. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, Dr. Breslow is a former president of the American Heart Association.
His numerous honors include the American Academy of Pediatrics E. Mead Johnson Award, the Heinrich Wieland Prize in Lipid Research, the American Heart Association Basic Research Prize, the Pasarow Foundation Cardiovascular Research Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Cardiovascular Research, and the New York City Mayor’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology.
Professor
Medical College of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, Wis.
Dr. Gross received his Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Utah in 1971. Dr. Gross joined the faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin in 1973 and was promoted to professor in 1980. He has been a continuously NIH-funded investigator for the past 33 years.
His major area of research concerns mechanisms by which endogenous substances released by the heart can protect the myocardium during ischemia and/or reperfusion, a phenomenon termed ischemic preconditioning (IPC). In this regard, Dr. Gross's laboratory was the first to demonstrate that the ATP-sensitive potassium channel was a critical trigger and effector of IPC. This breakthrough has been repeated by a number of investigators and remains one of the key components of this remarkable cardioprotective phenomenon.
Dr. Gross's was also the first laboratory to identify a role for endogenous opioids in triggering and mediating the cardioprotective effects of acute or delayed IPC and that exogenous opioids such as morphine also possessed potent cardioprotective properties mediated via KATP channel opening.
Most recently, he was awarded an NIH MERIT Award in which he uncovered a new endogenous cardioprotective pathway that appears to be mediated by CYP 450 isoforms in the heart.
Over the past 33 years Dr. Gross's work has resulted in approximately 400 full-length peer reviewed journal articles, reviews and book chapters. Dr Gross has been an invited speaker at more than 80 universities and pharmaceutical companies. He has mentored 15 Ph.D. students and 10 postdoctoral fellows, 95 percent of whom were funded by fellowships from the American Heart Association.
Dr. Gross is a reviewer for all the leading cardiovascular journals including Circulation Research, Cardiovascular Research and Circulation. He also serves on the editorial board of eight journals and has been an associate editor of the American Journal of Physiology for the past eight years.
Dr. Gross is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, a founding Fellow of the International Society of Heart Research and is a member of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the American Physiological Society.
Professor of Medicine and Public Health
Boston University School of Medicine
Framingham, Mass.
Dr. Kannel, a summa cum laude graduate of the Medical College of Georgia (1949), trained in internal medicine in the U.S. Public Health Service in New York and was certified in 1958
He became a fellow of the American College of Cardiology in 1969, the American Heart Association (1966), American College of Epidemiology (1981), and American College of Preventive Medicine (1984).
He has been active in cardiovascular epidemiology for more than 50 years, associated with the Framingham Study since its inception in 1950. In 1996 he became its director, succeeding Dr. Thomas R. Dawber, the original architect of the world famous study.
He also received a master's degree in public health and epidemiology cum laude from Harvard in 1959.
He was associated with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) for over 35 years and has a long and abiding interest in preventive cardiology, for which he received numerous awards including the Canadian Gairdner Award (1976), Bruce Memorial Award of the ACP (1982), Dana Award(1986), Dutch Einthoven Award (1973), AHA Research Achievement Award (1994), and New York Academy of Medicine Award (2006).
Dr. Kannel has also received honorary medical degrees from Gothenberg Sweden, University of Rio De Janiero, and Medical College of Ohio (Doctor of Science).
He was past chairman of the AHA Council of Epidemiology and chief of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology of Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Kannel is professor of medicine and public health at Boston University School of Medicine and a senior investigator at the Framingham Study.
Dwight and Vera Dunlevie
Professor of Pediatric Cardiology
Director of Cardiopulmonary Research Program at Wall Center
Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, Calif.
A graduate of McGill University Medical School in 1971, Dr. Rabinovitch completed internship and residency at the University of Colorado Medical Center in 1973, worked for the Ministry of Health in Israel from 1973-74 and completed her fellowship in pediatric cardiology at Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital Medical Center in 1977. She is board certified in pediatric cardiology in the United States and Canada.
Dr. Rabinovitch was appointed assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and relocated in 1982, as associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto. She was subsequently appointed professor of pediatrics in laboratory medicine and pathobiology, and of medicine at the University of Toronto, and director of cardiovascular research at the Research Institute, Hospital for Sick Children, from 1988 until her recruitment to Stanford in 2002.
An international leader in the fields of pulmonary vascular development and vascular biology, Dr. Rabinovitch authored more than 130 peer-reviewed articles and 90 reviews. She was recognized with numerous prestigious awards, most recently, the AHA 2005 Dickinson Richards Lecture, the AHA 2004 Basic Science Research Prize, and the 2004 Canadian Institutes for Health Research, Institute for Circulatory and Respiratory Health Lectureship and Prize.
Previous awards include:
- McGill University Cushing Memorial Award in Pediatrics (1971)
- Canadian Cardiovascular Society Research Achievement Award (1994)
- American Physiological Society Julius Comroe Lectureship (1996)
- Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada Award of Merit (1999)
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research Distinguished Scientist Award (2000)
- AHA Paul Dudley White Lectureship (2002)
- 2003 Gill Heart Institute (University of Kentucky) Award for Outstanding Contributions to Cardiovascular Research
Chairman, Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics
Professor of Physiology and Biophysics,
Biochemistry and Medicine
Boston University School of Medicine
Boston, Mass.
Dr. Donald M. Small was born in Newton, Mass. in 1931 and moved to California as a young boy. He attended Occidental College, graduating in 1954, and went on to UCLA Medical School, graduating in 1960. He attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and obtained a masters in physiology.
After a residency in internal medicine in Boston, he spent two and a half years studying biophysics of lipids and proteins at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. There, he began his studies on the physical chemistry of cholesterol and its interaction with membrane lipids and bile salts.
These studies led to a hypothesis for the formation of bile and predicted the abnormalities leading to biliary cholesterol supersaturation and gallstone formation. Dr. Small and his students studied bile formation and composition in animals and humans and determined that cholesterol supersaturation was a result of diminished bile salt secretion and/or increased cholesterol secretion leading to abnormal bile, which when nucleated formed cholesterol crystals, then grew into gallstones.
Turning to liver secretion in the plasma, he began the study of lipoproteins and atherosclerosis model systems of lipid in lipoproteins and atherosclerotic deposits to generate theories of lipoprotein structure and cholesterol deposition in the process of atherogenesis. Later with colleagues, he showed the changes in the physical behavior of lipid deposits as atherosclerosis regressed. These studies formed the basis for the deposition of lipids in atherosclerotic plaques and how they evolve during progression and regression.
Dr. Small founded the Biophysics Department at Boston University School of Medicine in 1988 and later chaired the Physiology and Biophysics Department until July 2006.
He is the author of more than 300 scientific articles and one major book, “The Physical Chemistry of Lipids.”
He received The American Gastroenterology Association’s Beaumont Prize and was the George Lyman Duff Memorial Lecture of the American Heart Association in 1986.
Dr. Small has three sons and four grandchildren and continues to be active in the lab. He is an avid skier and outdoorsman.
Professor of Public Health (Epidemiology & Biostatistics)
Research Professor of Medicine (Preventive Medicine & Epidemiology)
Professor of Public Health (Epidemiology & Biostatistics)
BU School of Public Health
Principal Investigator, The Framingham Study
Boston University School of Medicine
Boston, Mass.
Dr. Wolf received his medical degree from the State University of New York, at Syracuse, cum laude in 1960 and was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha.
He trained in medicine at Boston City Hospital and at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and in neurology and neuropathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He also trained in epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.
He is professor of neurology and research professor of medicine (epidemiology and preventive medicine) at Boston University School of Medicine, and professor of public health.
He has been a Framingham Study investigator since 1967 and has been PI of the Framingham Heart Study Contract from NHLBI to Boston University since 1989.
His research interest has been in the epidemiology of stroke, dementia and cognitive decline.
He was chief of the Stroke Section at Boston University from 1969 to 2000 and participated in many clinical and therapeutic trials of stroke including the NINDS Stroke Data Bank.
He is a member of the Stroke and Epidemiology & Disease Prevention councils of the AHA, having served on the Executive Committees of both, and was a member of the Science Affairs Council of the AHA.
Dr. Wolf is PI of an R01 Precursors of Stroke Incidence and Prognosis continuously funded by NINDS since 1981, and of two R01’s from the NIA: Epidemiology of Dementia since 1989, and MRI, Genetic & Cognitive Precursors of AD & Dementia funded since 1999.
He received the Jacob A. Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the NINDS, the Award for Excellence in Clinical Stroke of the AHA Stroke Council and delivered the Connor Memorial Lecture. He also received the Mihara Award of the International Stroke Society (1996) and ASA New England Chapter’s C. Miller Fisher Award (2000).
He is a member of numerous societies, including the American Neurological Association, American Epidemiologic Society and the American Academy of Neurology.
