Our Governance

Robert O. Bonow, MD, MS is the Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. After 16 years as a Senior Investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the NIH, and was appointed as Chief of the Division of Cardiology at Northwestern University and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a position he held from 1992 to 2011. He has authored over 750 manuscripts in the medical literature. He is Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Cardiology and is one of the editors of Braunwald’s Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Dr. Bonow is a past president of the American Heart Association, a Master of the American College of Cardiology and a Master of the American College of Physicians. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors and Board of Extramural Advisors of the NHLBI, the Board of Trustees of the American College of Cardiology, the Board of Directors of the American Heart Association, and the Subspecialty Board on Cardiovascular Disease of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

He has received numerous awards and honors from the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians, the European Society of Cardiology and the Cardiovascular Research Foundation.  An endowed chair was established in his name at Northwestern University in 2012.

Barbara Casadei is a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust where she leads the Cardiovascular Theme of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre and is Steering Committee Member of the BHF Centre for Research Excellence.

Professor Casadei graduated in Medicine (cum Laude & Medaglia Teresiana) at the University of Pavia, Italy and moved to Oxford in 1989 to undertake her clinical and research training. She was awarded the Joan and Richard Doll Fellowship at Green College in 1991, a DPhil in Cardiovascular Medicine in 1995, and a BHF Senior Research Fellowship in 2001.

She is Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, holds the highest honour of the British Cardiovascular Society (The Mackenzie Medal) and of the European Society of Cardiology (Gold Medal), and is Past President of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC, 2018-20). Dr Casadei is the founder of EuroHeart, an initiative supporting the assessment and improvement of quality of cardiovascular care in Europe https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehz599, the Cardiovascular Patient Forum, and the Women in the ESC (WinESC).

Professor Casadei is currently member of several Scientific Advisory/Funding Boards (e.g., Fondation Leducq; MRC; Netherland Heart Institute; German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK); Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine) and Editorial Boards (e.g., Cardiovascular Research; Circulation; European Heart Journal; Circulation Research), and has delivered numerous named lectures including, The William Harvey Lecture on Basic Science and Silver Medal of the ESC, 2013; The Thomas Lewis Lecture and Silver Medal of the British Cardiovascular Society, 2014; The William H Gaasch Lecture, University of Massachusetts, 2017; The Michael Sole Lecture, University of Toronto, 2019; The 4th Annual Gootter Foundation Lecture, Stanford University, US; The Robert Reneman Lecture, University of Maastricht, NL, and the Roman W. DeSanctis Lecture, Harvard Medical School, US in 2021; and the ISHR Keith Reimer Distinguished Lecture in 2022.

She provides a clinical service at the John Radcliffe Hospital and leads a bench-to-bedside translational research programme, which spans from bench-based investigation in human tissue and cells to clinical trials.

Dr. Robert A. Harrington is a cardiologist and serves as the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medicine and Provost for Medical Affairs of Cornell University. His research areas of focus include evaluating antithrombotic therapies to treat acute ischemic heart disease and to minimize the acute complications of percutaneous coronary procedures and trying to better understand and improve upon the methodology of clinical research, including the use of technologies to facilitate the conduct of clinical trials.

Dr. Harrington was the Arthur L. Bloomfield Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University for more than 10 years. He previously served as the Richard Stack Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute at Duke University, where he completed his fellowship in general and interventional cardiology.

A previous American Heart Association (AHA) president, Dr. Harrington remains a member of AHA’s Board of Directors. He is also an elected member of the Association of American Physicians, the Association of University Cardiologists, and the National Academy of Medicine / Institute of Medicine. In addition, he has served as a chair and member of the US Food and Drug Administration Cardiovascular and Renal Drugs Advisory Committee.

Among his numerous awards and recognition, Dr. Harrington was named a Master of the American College of Cardiology in 2016, was awarded the AHA’s Clinical Research Prize in 2017, and earned the AHA Council on Clinical Cardiology (CLCD) Distinguished Achievement Award in 2022. In 2022, he was awarded the Stokes Medal, and in 2023, Honorary Fellowship in the Irish Cardiac Society.

A Silicon Valley medical device entrepreneur, Fred is Managing Director of Incept LLC, a health sciences innovations accelerator, founded in 1998. Incept has founded 23 medical companies (16 with exits), in which Fred has served as an executive and/or a director. For more than 30 years, Fred has held management and executive positions in both large and small medical technology enterprises. Fred is either inventor or co-inventor on over 200 US and worldwide granted and patent applications. He serves on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS.org), a bipartisan think tank dedicated to providing strategic national security insights to help decisionmakers chart a course toward a better world; is a member of the Board of Directors at Spirit of America (spiritofamerica.org) a non-profit that promotes private-sector support for the safety and success of our troops and the local people they want to help; and a Convening Board Member for Technology for America (T4A.org), a nonprofit for promotion of innovation as a way to engage public-private dialogue that benefit all Americans. Fred holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Dr. Azin Parhizgar is a highly accomplished medical device executive and serial entrepreneur.

She has served as an advisor and board member to numerous emerging medtech companies as well as various academic and non-for-profit entities. Currently Dr. Parhizgar is a senior Venture Partner at 415 Capital Management, a cardiovascular focused early-stage venture investment fund, Chairman of the board of CVPath Institute, Inc. and serves as an independent director at InnovHeart S.r.l, SoundBite Medical Inc., Project Moray among other held positions.

In her five-year tenure as the President and CEO of Claret Medical, an embolic protection company, Dr. Parhizgar led the venture-backed company to a successful global commercial launch with subsequent acquisition in 2018 by Boston Scientific, Inc.

Prior to Claret Medical, she was the COO of Conor Medsystems, a reservoir based drug eluting stent Company acquired by Johnson & Johnson, Inc. in 2007. Prior to Conor Medsystems Dr. Parhizgar was Senior Vice President at Arterial Vascular Engineering (AVE), which was acquired by Medtronic Inc. in 2000. She remained with Medtronic for the following two years as Executive Vice President of Emerging Ventures and New Technologies leading key investments in early stage companies for Medtronic Vascular division.

Dr. Parhizgar earned both her Ph.D. in Cell, Gene and Tissue Engineering and her M.Sc. in Biomechanical Engineering and Artificial Organ Design from Brown University in Providence, RI, USA.