Alphabetical Listing of All Members

Dr. Albert is the director of the Center for Arrhythmia Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Albert received her MD from Harvard Medical School and MPH from Harvard Chan School. She completed her Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and Cardiac Electrophysiology training at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She currently holds joint appointments as a clinical cardiac electrophysiologist and epidemiologist within the divisions of cardiovascular and preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Albert is currently the principal investigator on two NIH-sponsored R01s, and her research focuses on epidemiology, risk stratification, and prevention of sudden cardiac death and atrial fibrillation in large prospective cohort designs and in multi-center clinical studies, with her most notably seminal contributions regarding the contribution of diet, lifestyle, and genetics to the burden of heart rhythm disorders.

Dr. Albert serves on the editorial boards of Heart Rhythm and is the president-elect of the Heart Rhythm Society. In 2019, Dr. Albert joined Cedars-Sinai Medical Center as the founding chair of the department of cardiology and the Lee and Harold Kapelovitz Endowed Chair in Research Cardiology.

Emelia J. Benjamin, MD, ScM, FACC, FAHA, received her AB at Harvard, her MD at Case Western Reserve University, and her Epidemiology ScM at Harvard School of Public Health. She is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Boston University and is a cardiologist at Boston Medical Center. She is a Robert Dawson Evans Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine.

She is author of over 800 peer-reviewed publications that focus on the genetics, epidemiology, and prognosis of a variety of cardiovascular conditions and markers including atrial fibrillation, vascular function, and systemic inflammation. She has been continuously NIH funded since 1998, and currently is multi-Principal Investigator on an R01 atrial fibrillation grant [2R01HL092577], several chronic pain grants, and is the Training Director on the Boston University American Heart Association Strategically Focused Research Network on Cardio-Oncology.

Dr. Benjamin has conducted research at the Framingham Study since 1988. She is a Member of the Executive Committee, and is Co-Director of the Medical Endpoints Committee. She was Principal Investigator of the grant that recruited the second generation of the Framingham Study’s ethnic/racial minority cohort, the Omni Study.

Dr. Julie E. Buring is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women‘s Hospital and a professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The primary focus of Dr. Buring’s research is the epidemiology of the prevention of chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular disease and cancer, with a primary methodologic focus on randomized clinical trials. Dr. Buring has been involved in the design, conduct, analysis, and interpretation of a number of large-scale randomized clinical trials and their observational follow-up. She served as the principal investigator of the Women’s Health Study trial, evaluating the balance of benefits and risks of low-dose aspirin and vitamin E in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer among 40,000 female health professionals. She is currently co-principal investigator of the extended observational follow-up of the participants. She also served as co-principal investigator of VITAL, a completed trial of vitamin D and fish oil in the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer among 26,000 participants, which is in the observational follow-up phase. She has also served as co-investigator of the Physicians’ Health Study, which evaluated in large-scale randomized trials the preventive roles of low-dose aspirin, beta-carotene, vitamin E, vitamin C, and a multivitamin on cardiovascular disease, cancer, vision, and cognitive function.

David Christiani, MD, MPH, MS, is the Elkan Blout Professor of Environmental Genetics at Harvard Chan School and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He earned his MD in 1976 from Tufts University, and an MS and MPH from Harvard Chan School. He did his post-graduate medical training at Boston City Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Christiani’s major research interest lies in the interaction between human genes and the environment. In the emerging field of molecular epidemiology, he studies the impact of humans’ exposure to pollutants on health, as well as the how genetic and acquired susceptibility to these diseases along with environmental exposures can lead to acute and chronic pulmonary and cardiovascular disease. He is also developing new methods for assessing health effects after exposure to pollutants and is very active in environmental and occupational health studies internationally.

Dr. Cook is a biostatistician involved in the design, conduct, and analysis of several large randomized trials, including the Women’s Health Study, the Physicians’ Health Study, and the VITamin D and OmegA-3 TriaL (VITAL). She leads the Trials of Hypertension Prevention (TOHP) Follow-up Study, an observational study focusing on the long-term effects of weight loss and sodium reduction interventions on subsequent cardiovascular disease and mortality.

Dr. Cook’s methodologic efforts focus on modeling observational data for developing risk prediction scores using clinical and genetic biomarkers. She has helped develop the Reynolds Risk Score for cardiovascular disease as well as improved methodology for comparing and evaluating risk prediction models.

Dr. Danaei received his medical degree from the Tehran School of Medical Sciences and his MS and Doctor of Science degrees in Epidemiology and Global Health and Population from Harvard Chan School. His global health research focuses on quantifying the population-level impact of risk factors and preventive interventions on cardiovascular disease, globally with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. He serves as a core member of a global consortium that focuses on examining country-level, regional and global levels and trends of major cardiometabolic risk factors (www.NCDrisC.org). He led the team that developed the first country-level risk prediction model for cardiovascular disease (www.globorisk.org) that has since been used by several dozen research and clinical groups worldwide. His team has also examined the impact of risk factors on health disparities within or across countries and quantified the potential impact of population-level preventive interventions on health disparities.

His epidemiological research applies advanced methods of causal inference to questions of comparative effectiveness research from electronic health records and other observational data. He has helped further develop and apply marginal structural models and the parametric G-formula to quantify the causal effects of lifestyle changes or medications on long-term risk of cardiovascular diseases while adjusting for time-varying confounding and selection bias.

Dr. de Ferranti is interested in describing, identifying, and evaluating and treating atherosclerotic risk factors during childhood to reduce cardiovascular disease burden during adulthood. She divides her time between clinical and implementation research, directing the Preventive Cardiology Clinic and providing clinical care for both preventive cardiology and congenital heart disease patients. Her research has included epidemiology, nutrition and pharmaceutical clinical trials, and more recently qualitative and modeling projects, and quality improvement. She developed a definition of pediatric metabolic syndrome, described its prevalence using national survey data (Circulation 2004) and applied the definition to subsequent NHANES data looking at the association with CRP in childhood (Clin Chem 2006). Her first clinical research project, “Inflammation in Children at High Risk for Atherosclerotic Disease”, laid the ground work for a nutritional intervention that was supported by an Eleanor and Miles Shore Scholarship, and subsequently by NHLBI through the K23 mechanism. This project, “Nutritional Treatment of Adolescents at Increased Risk for Early Atherosclerosis: an RCT,” was the first feeding study conducted at Boston Children’s Hospital, and the first of its kind in overweight adolescents.

Samuel  Z. Goldhaber, MD  is the section head for Vascular Medicine and director of the Thrombosis Research Group within the Cardiovascular Medicine Division of Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS).

He received his medical degree from HMS. He completed his internal medicine residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now BWH) and was appointed as chief medical resident at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Roxbury (now VA Boston Healthcare System). He then completed his cardiology fellowship at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now BWH). Dr. Goldhaber is board certified in cardiovascular disease and internal medicine.

My research is focused on methodology for causal inference, including comparative effectiveness of policy and clinical interventions.

My collaborators and I combine observational data, mostly untestable assumptions, and statistical methods to emulate hypothetical randomized experiments. We emphasize the need to formulate well defined causal questions, and use analytic approaches whose validity does not require assumptions that conflict with current subject-matter knowledge. For example, in settings in which experts suspect the presence of time-dependent confounders affected by prior treatment, we do not use adjustment methods (e.g., conventional regression analysis) that require the absence of such confounders.

While causal inferences from observational data are always risky, an appropriate analysis of observational studies often results in the best available evidence for policy or clinical decision-making. At the very least, the findings from well designed and properly analyzed observational studies may guide the design of future randomized experiments.

Our applied work is focused on optimal use of antiretroviral therapy in persons infected with HIV, lifestyle and pharmacological interventions to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease, and the effects of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents among dialysis patients.

Sonia Hernandez-Diaz, MD, DrPH is a Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School. Her area of interest is drug safety evaluation from non-randomized data, with a special emphasis on the design, conduct, and analysis of studies in pregnant women and their infants. Examples of her work include inquiries of the comparative safety of psychotropics for pregnant women and their offspring using real world evidence from both pregnancy registries and large healthcare databases. She is Past-President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and the Society for Perinatal and Pediatric Epidemiology Research; and serves as a Special Government Employee for the FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee (current Chair), as a member of the NICHD Pregnancy & Neonatology (PN) Study Section, and as member of the Teratogenic Information Services (TERIS) Advisory Board. Through her service to public health institutions she has contributed to the translation of research into policy and actionable recommendations for stakeholders.

Dr. Frank Hu’s research has focused on diet/lifestyle, metabolic, and genetic determinants of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (CVD). His major research interests include epidemiology and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases through diet and lifestyle; gene-environment interactions and risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes; nutritional metabolomics in type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease; and obesity, metabolic phenotypes, and cardiovascular disease in low and middle-income countries. Dr. Hu’s group has conducted detailed analyses of many dietary and lifestyle factors and risk of diabetes and CVD, including sugar-sweetened beverages, coffee, red meat, saturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids, iron, and dietary patterns in large prospective cohort studies including the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study. These findings have contributed to current public health recommendations and policies for the prevention of chronic diseases. His group has also identified novel biomarkers and gene-environment interactions in relation to risk of obesity and diabetes by integrating cutting-edge omics technologies into epidemiological studies. In addition, Dr. Hu has conducted extensive research on nutrition transition, metabolic phenotypes, and cardiovascular disease in low and middle-income countries.

Dr. Kubzansky received her Ph.D. (social psychology) from the University of Michigan, and completed a two year postdoctoral fellowship in social epidemiology as well as obtained her M.P.H. at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Kubzansky has published extensively on the role of psychological and social factors in health, with a particular focus on the effects of stress and emotion on heart disease. She also conducts research on whether stress, emotion and other psychological factors help to explain the relationship between social status and health. Other research projects and interests include a) studying the biological mechanisms linking emotions, social relationships, and health; b) relationships between early childhood environments, resilience, and healthy aging, and; c) how interactions between psychosocial stress and environmental exposures (e.g., lead, air pollution) may influence health.

Dr. Levy’s main areas of research interest include the epidemiology and genetics of cardiovascular disease, with a focus on coronary disease, hypertension, and heart failure. He aims to merge the robust clinical and longitudinal data available from the Framingham Heart Study with the latest advances in genomic sciences to gain insight into the complex relations between complex cardiovascular traits and the onset of heart disease.

Eric Rimm, ScD, is professor of epidemiology and nutrition and director of the Program in Cardiovascular Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. 

For over two decades he has conducted extensive research on the health effects of diet and lifestyle in relation to obesity and chronic disease. He is internationally recognized for his extensive work in the study of the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption, whole grains, micronutrients, and polyphenols. He also studies the impact of local and national food nutrition policy as it relates to the improvement of diets of school children and for the one in seven Americans on food assistance programs. 

He has previously served on an Institute of Medicine’s Food Policy committee and the scientific advisory committee for the 2010 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. He has published more than 600 peer-reviewed publications during his 23 years on the faculty at Harvard. Dr. Rimm has received several awards for his work including the American Society for Nutrition General Mills Institute of Health and Nutrition Innovation Award.