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Grant Award

Researchers Awarded $2.5M to Support Cardiovascular Epidemiology Training

Vanessa Xanthakis, PhD, FAHA, associate professor of medicine and director of research training, and Mathew Nayor, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine, have been awarded a five-year, T32 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. This is the second five-year renewal for the project, “Multidisciplinary Training Program in Cardiovascular Epidemiology,” which began in 2016.

Cardiovascular epidemiology is a public health discipline studying the distribution, causes and prevention of heart and blood vessel diseases in populations. It identifies risks like hypertension, smoking and diabetes to reduce global cardiovascular disease mortality, which still accounts for one-third of deaths worldwide.

The program is a comprehensive two-year multidisciplinary training program in cardiovascular epidemiology (CVE) for MDs and PhDs who want to pursue an academic and scientific research career. It will graduate five postdoctoral scholars every two years in four different training tracks (translational epidemiology and biology, translational epidemiology and implementation, statistical genetics-genomics, and bioinformatics-computational biology).

Xanthakis is a biostatistician with training in applied mathematics and statistics and has a strong commitment to clinical epidemiological research. She is an investigator with the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) and serves as the biostatistician on several investigations. For the last 15 years, her research has focused on the epidemiology of cardiac remodeling and subclinical disease, including identifying cardiovascular disease risk factors. She has led studies evaluating the ideal cardiovascular health concept, as it is defined by the American Heart Association, and its relations to multiple disease outcomes. She also studies population-based vascular testing and echocardiography, including identifying biological, environmental and genetic determinants (correlates) of cardiac structure as well as the function and epidemiology of novel biomarkers including but not limited to natriuretic peptides, adipokines and vascular growth factors. She also directs the FHS Pathway Program within the school’s Internal Medicine residency program, allowing residents the opportunity to engage in clinical research within the FHS.

Nayor is a clinical-translational investigator and heart failure cardiologist. He also has worked closely with the FHS for the last eight years and currently leads community-based studies evaluating metabolic responses to discrete physiologic perturbations, such as exercise and a dietary intervention. His research background includes basic science investigations, physiologic studies and cardiovascular epidemiology focusing on the intersection of metabolic health and cardiovascular disease. His group and collaborators have studied the effect of exercise on metabolism; physiologic determinants of fitness; novel protein biomarkers of heart failure risk through broad proteomic profiling and lifestyle contributors to cardiometabolic disease and heart failure.