Flora Sam, MD, Appointed Interim Director of the Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute

Sam_Flora_2Flora Sam, MD, professor of Medicine, has been appointed interim director of the Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute, effective February 1. She replaces Kenneth Walsh, PhD, who has accepted a position at the University of Virginia.

Sam received her MD from the six-year undergraduate-MD program at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa. She did her residency training at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York and cardiology fellowship at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston with a subsequent research and advanced fellowship in heart failure. She joined our community in 2000 as an assistant professor of Medicine.

Her research is in cardiac myocyte biology and mechanistic underpinnings of cardiac remodeling in various disease states including heart failure, infiltrative cardiomyopathies and hypertension with a major focus on heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), also known previously as “diastolic failure heart failure.” Internationally recognized in the HFpEF field, she is a physician-scientist and translational researcher whose research is bidirectional, going first from the patient and then to the basic laboratory. She serves as an advanced heart failure cardiologist in Cardiology and the CCU at Boston Medical Center.

In 2011 she was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), an honor society of physician-scientists, for an outstanding record of scholarly achievement in biomedical research in young investigators, who translate findings in the laboratory to the advancement of clinical practice.

Sam serves on numerous national committees, most recently on the NHLBI Working Group on HFpEF, and on the writing committee to develop the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Foundation/American Heart Association (AHA) Guideline for the Diagnosis and Management of Heart Failure in Adults. She has served on multiple NIH, VA, AHA and international study sections and is presently a permanent study section reviewer for the Clinical and Integrative Cardiovascular Sciences Study Section (NHLBI) for a six-year term. Sam is a fellow of the ACC, AHA and the Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA).