2026 MENTORSHIP AWARDS

Sarah Abou Alaiwi, MD, is a cardiology fellow and physician-researcher at Yale School of Medicine, where she works in the Cardiovascular Data Science (CarDS) Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Rohan Khera. She earned her medical degree with honors from the American University of Beirut and completed internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Prior to cardiology training, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she led epigenomic and germline genetic studies in genitourinary cancers, resulting in first-author publications in Nature Communications, Cancer Cell, and Cell Reports.

Her clinical training at Yale is focused on advanced cardiac imaging and cardiovascular genetics, with a particular interest in inherited cardiomyopathies including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and transthyretin cardiac amyloidosis. Through the CarDS Lab, her research integrates machine learning, natural language processing, and large-scale electronic health record data to bridge translational genetics with clinical care delivery.

Her award-winning project, EQuA-ATTR (Electronic Quality Assessment for ATTR Cardiac Amyloidosis), applies retrieval-augmented generation large language models to automatically measure care quality across the ATTR-CM diagnostic and treatment pathway, with a focus on identifying disparities affecting women and populations with high hereditary TTR variant prevalence. Through a partnership with the Heart Institute of the Caribbean, the project aims to extend equitable quality assessment to resource-variable settings globally.

Dr. Lam a Senior Consultant Cardiologist at the National Heart Centre Singapore, having pioneered the first Women’s Heart Clinic in Singapore. Academically, she serves as a tenured Full Professor at Duke-National University of Singapore, having also graduated from the Stanford Executive Program in 2015, and obtained a PhD at the University Medical Centre Groningen, the Netherlands in 2016. In the field of MedTech, Dr. Lam is co-founder of Us2.ai, an award-winning startup dedicated to the automation of the fight against heart disease by applying artificial intelligence to echocardiography (ultrasound of the heart).

Dr. Lam is world-renowned for her expertise in heart failure, and particularly heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) — the type of heart failure that affects mostly elderly women and is the predominant type of heart failure in ageing societies worldwide; yet until very recently without an effective treatment and thus representing one of the largest unmet needs in cardiovascular medicine. Her research has been focused on understanding the epidemiology and pathophysiology of HFpEF, in order to identify novel therapeutic targets and design effective clinical trials.

Her publications have ranged from fundamental animal disease models to comprehensive hemodynamic characterization (including echocardiographic and circulating biomarkers) of human disease and large cohort studies; with her PhD highlighting “Novel insights into HFpEF”. Most notably, her work as part of the global steering committees of the PARAGON-HF, DELIVER and FINEARTS-HF trials, as well as the scientific excellence committee of the EMPEROR-Preserved trial contributed to the first FDA-approved treatment for HFpEF, as well as the first robustly positive clinical outcomes trials in HFpEF that have resulted in a Class IA recommended therapy for HFpEF in international guidelines (where previously there was none).

Dr. Lam’s outstanding contributions to cardiology is evident in her leadership of several large multi-institutional consortia locally, regionally and internationally; all of which have been extremely productive both in terms of high impact publications and attracting funding support from industry and academic partners.

• In Singapore, she is the Founding Programme Lead of the Asian neTwork for Translational Research and Cardiovascular Trials (ATTRaCT) – an ASTAR Biomedical Research Council-funded nationwide research platform focused on heart failure (and HFpEF in particular). ATTRaCT is the first integrated platform for translational cardiovascular research that leverages on Singapore’s competitive advantages to identify & validate novel targets in disease progression, with opportunities to collaborate with industry partners early and at all levels of translation, thus potentially accelerating drug development. It is the largest platform for translational cardiovascular research funded by ASTAR ($30M new + >$60M existing funding) and involving 9 top institutions in Singapore: A*STAR’s 5 biomedical research institutes; 2 academic institutions (NUS-CeLs & Duke-NUS); and both of Singapore’s national heart institutions. The programme has won numerous awards and is highlighted as a model for translational research in other disease areas in Singapore.
• Regionally, she is Principal Investigator of the first multinational investigator-led Asian study of heart failure across 11 Asian regions (Asian Sudden Cardiac Death in Heart Failure [ASIAN-HF] study), as well as a multinational investigator-led trial in diabetes (Asian Diabetes Outcomes Prevention Trial [ADOPT]).
• Globally, she is appointed on the Global Executive Committees of several multinational heart failure and cardiometabolic trials. Notably, she is Co-chair two large (N~15,500 each) ongoing global outcomes trials: (1) the SURMOUNT-MMO trial of the dual glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist tirzepatide for reduction in morbidity and mortality in adults with obesity (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT05556512); and (2) the LIBREXIA-AF trial of the Factor XIa inhibitor milvexian in patients with atrial fibrillation (NCT NCT05757869). She has most recently been appointed as Co-lead Commissioner for the Lancet Commission: Tackling Cardiovascular Disease in Asia Pacific region.

Dr. Lam’s leadership in the field is recognized in her appointments to the 2021 European Society of Cardiology Heart Failure Guidelines Task Force, as International Honorary Fellow of the Heart Failure Society of America 2021 and bestowment of an Honorary Degree of Doctor Philosophiae causa by the University of Oslo in 2020. Her accomplishments are also recognized in numerous awards and grants (Appendix). She has published >700 articles in journals including NEJM, JAMA, Nature Med, Lancet, Circulation, and European Heart Journal with a H-index of 121; and has been recognized as the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2021, 2022, 2023 and as a World Expert by Expertscape’s PubMed-based algorithms (top 0.1% of scholars writing about Heart Failure over the past 10 years; Heart Failure: Worldwide – Expertscape.com).

She is lead author of the chapter on HFpEF for Braunwald’s Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine, 12th Edition — the award-winning textbook trusted by generations of cardiologists for the latest, most reliable guidance in the field. She serves as Deputy Editor for JACC and previously as Associate Editor for Circulation (top Cardiology Journal) and Eur J Heart Fail. Her achievements were recognized in nominations as the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Rene Laennec Lecturer in Clinical Cardiology in 2022, Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA) 2023 Mihai Gheorghiade Lectureship and Singapore Cardiac Society Lecturer 2024. More recently, in recognition of her work, she has been appointed as the Chief of Clinical Research in Asia Pacific and Chief of Innovation in Artificial Intelligence at the Baim Institute of Clinical Research.

Most recently, Dr. Lam has gained widespread recognition as a pioneer in the application of digital technology/artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical medicine. Her work as co-founder of an award-winning AI-echo startup (Us2.ai) has revolutionized cardiac imaging, making diagnostics more accurate, accessible, and efficient. Dr. Lam was responsible for setting the medical direction of the company, ensuring its market leading position in the field of machine learning applied to cardiovascular disease detection. She formulated the company’s strategic vision for clinical research and development, creating new revenue sources and collaborations with the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, and leading the company to regulatory approval all over the world.

Us2.ai clinched top prize at SLINGSHOT 2019, is listed as Forbes Asia 100 to Watch, and won the FedEx Small Business Grant Contest 2021. By integrating AI into cardiovascular imaging, her work has played a pivotal role in enhancing diagnostic precision, reducing inter-observer variability, and expanding echocardiography’s utility in resource-limited settings. This advancement has the potential to reshape the future of cardiovascular diagnostics, ensuring early detection and better disease stratification for patients.

Finally, Dr. Lam is well-known for championing women in cardiovascular science. She is passionate about investigating sex differences in cardiovascular disease, including the role of gender disparities. She has spoken and published widely on the predominance of women suffering from HFpEF, and the need for sex-specific approaches to heart disease. She established the first Women’s Heart Clinic in 2011 – the first in Singapore and Asia — a unique clinical service addressing the top killer among Asian women (cardiovascular disease), tailored to the specific needs of women, and recognizing important sex differences in cardiovascular risk that impact clinical care.

She is a long-standing advocate for women’s heart health, and the only Commissioner from Asia appointed in an international team for The Lancet’s Commission for Women and Cardiovascular Disease (www.womencvdcommission.org). She has mentored over 40 junior researchers, many of whom have secured independent grants, presented at international conferences, published first-author papers in leading journals, and won numerous prestigious awards. She is recognized for her mentorship of women in academic medicine with the Rosalind Franklin Fellowship in Europe (University Medical Centre Groningen).

Dr Joanna Popiolek-Kalisz is a cardiologist at the Department of Cardiology, Cardinal Wyszynski Hospital in Lublin, Poland, and an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Clinical Dietetics at the Medical University of Lublin. Her clinical and research work focuses on cardiovascular prevention, lipid disorders, clinical nutrition, and body composition assessment, with particular interest in improving long-term cardiometabolic care after cardiovascular events.

She completed the Polish Clinical Scholars Research Training Program at Harvard Medical School and is actively involved in national and international initiatives in preventive cardiology and lipidology, including the Polish Lipid Association, the European Association of Preventive Cardiology, the European Atherosclerosis Society, and the World Heart Federation.