Dr. Vasan Ramachandran Appointed Founding Dean, University of Texas School of Public Health at San Antonio
Vasan Ramachandran, MD, has been appointed the founding Dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health at San Antonio, effective in September.
A member of our community since 1993, Dr. Ramachandran is the Jay and Louise Coffman Professor of Vascular Biology, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at BUSM and BUSPH, and Chief of the Section of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology in the Department of Medicine. Since 2014 he has served as principal investigator and director of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). He also is principal investigator of the RURAL (Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal) Cohort Study, which aims to address critical gaps in our knowledge of heart and lung disorders in rural counties in the southeastern U.S. An internationally known and highly respected physician scientist and clinical epidemiologist, Dr. Ramachandran’s research has focused on heart failure, blood pressure and cardiac remodeling.
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- With a current active annual research grant portfolio of nearly $20 million and as a recipient of over $100 million from the National Institutes of Health over the last 20 years, Dr. Ramachandran is a prolific and collaborative investigator with a primary focus of leading and evaluating studies related to the epidemiology and genetic architecture of blood pressure, cardiac and vascular remodeling, and he contributed to the description of the entity of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.
- He has earned an h-index of 188 in Google Scholar discovery with over 1,060 publications to his name including many in prominent journals such as NEJM, JACC, JAMA and Circulation.
- He led and directed the first School of Public Health in India, the Achutha Menon Center for Health Science Studies in Kerala, where he enrolled and coordinated the first two cohorts of Master of Public Health students, a two-year residential, 60-credit program targeting mid-career physician leaders in the country. He oversaw the recruitment of the core faculty and staff, supervised curriculum development and arranged for collaborations with prominent U.S. universities such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard, UC Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- As director of two NIH training grants (T32 and R38), Dr. Ramachandran has built mentoring support groups for non-white scholars within the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. His experience as an immigrant and foreign-medical graduate from a developing country has given him a heightened awareness of the challenges encountered by individuals from non-majority groups and he has thus focused his attention on addressing health disparities and working toward health equity.
Dr. Ramachandran received his primary and high school education in India after which he completed a year of premedical training and then entered the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the top-ranked medical institution in India and South Asia with an attached 2,000-bed multispecialty teaching hospital. He spent the next 15 years in India training to be a physician as an internist, a senior resident and a cardiologist before moving to the United States, where he sought additional subspecialty training in imaging and cardiovascular epidemiology at the Framingham Heart Study.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Ramachandran on his new appointment and thanking him for his many contributions to our community.