Craig Hartley, Ph.D.

Dr. Hartley received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970, and then came to Houston for a postdoctoral fellowship in Bioengineering at Rice University. Since 1973 he has been with Baylor College of Medicine where he is currently a Professor of Medicine in the Section of Cardiovascular Sciences. He is also an adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Rice and of Electrical Engineering at the University of Houston, and is the director of the Instrumentation Development Core Laboratory of the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center. Since 1968 he has been active in the development of ultrasonic methods to measure blood flow and cardiovascular function in patients and in animal models of human diseases. Dr. Hartley is principal investigator on several research grants and has received a Research Career Development Award and a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. In 1993 he received the Laufman Prize for career achievement from the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation. Dr. Hartley is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and since 1973 has served on an NIH study section that reviews Small Business Grants. Dr. Hartley is a member of IC Therapeutics Scientific Advisory Board.

Robert A. Kloner, M.D., Ph.D.

Robert A. Kloner, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine, in the Cardiovascular Division, Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. He is also Director of Research at the Heart Institute of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles and attending cardiologist at Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center. Dr. Kloner received his MD in the Honors Program in Medical Education and PhD degrees from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha honor society. He completed internship and residency in internal medicine at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Additional training included clinical and research fellowships in medicine and cardiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He served as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and as an attending cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. There he received an Established Investigator Award of the American Heart Association. Dr. Kloner is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, an Inaugural Fellow of the Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences of the AHA, and was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation.

Among Dr. Kloner’s major research interests are cardiac cell transplantation, protection of ischemic myocardium, development of therapies for limiting myocardial infarct size, cardiac function following coronary artery occlusion, the effect of toxins on the heart, including the effect of air pollution on the heart, preventative cardiology, hypertension, and PDE5 inhibition. He has participated in studies funded by the National Institutes of Health on cardiac cell transplantation, doxorubicin cardiomyopathy, functional analysis of cardiac grafts, and stem cells. He has served on the NIH Cardiovascular Study Section A and has participated in a number of NIH Workshops. A frequent contributor to the medical and scientific press, Dr. Kloner has contributed over 560 original papers in peer-reviewed journals; over 210 chapters or monographs and over 445 abstracts. Dr. Kloner is the author and editor of 18 medical texts including: Ischemic Preconditioning , Cardiovascular Trials Reviews (10 editions), and The Guide to Cardiology (3 editions).

Among his editorial responsibilities, Dr. Kloner served as associate editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics from 1996 to 2009 and in 2009 became the editor-in-chief. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Impotence Research, and is Guest Editor of Circulation. He is on the editorial boards of American Journal of Cardiology, Heart, Basic Research in Cardiology, Regenerative Medicine, and Congestive Heart Failure. Among his many career distinctions, Dr. Kloner has been listed in Who’s Who in America and The Best Doctors in America and in 2002 was identified by the Institute for Scientific Information as ISI Highly cited.com; one of the worlds’s most highly cited scientific authors. Dr. Kloner is a frequent lecturer at major scientific symposia including the Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, and Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics Meetings, and he has lectured at most major academic medical centers in the United States.

Charles E. Murry, M.D., Ph.D.

Charles (Chuck) Murry is Professor of Pathology and Bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. Murry is Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Biology and Co-Director of the newly formed Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.D. from Duke University and did a fellowship in vascular biology at the University of Washington under Stephen M. Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D. Of particular note, Dr. Murry is widely recognized as the first to introduce the concept of ischemic preconditioning, in which repetitive brief periods of ischemia protected the myocardium from a subsequent longer ischemic insult (Circulation 74: 1124-1136, 1986). His awards include a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award in Biomedical Sciences in 1996, the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 2000 and 3 awards for outstanding teaching in basic sciences. The Murry laboratory’s research focuses on myocardial infarction and strategies to enhance the heart’s lack of intrinsic regenerative ability. Active projects explore the molecular mechanisms that underlie the heart's normal wound healing processes and in developing molecular and cell-based approaches to improve infarct repair, with a special emphasis on adult and pluripotent stem cells. They are a multidisciplinary group, doing basic work in molecular biology and regulation of gene expression, cell biology, tissue engineering, animal models of disease and analyses of human tissues.

Morteza Naghavi, M.D.

Dr. Naghavi is an innovative physician scientist and entrepreneur with special interests in the fields of cardiovascular medicine and medical technologies. As a former cardiology faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and Director of the Vulnerable Plaque Research Department at the Texas Heart Institute, he made several inventions and contributed to creating the field of “vulnerable plaque”, the immediate underlying cause of heart attacks. Early works by Dr. Naghavi and colleagues resulted in the foundation of Volcano Corporation (NASDAQ: VOLC), the leading vulnerable plaque detection company. Dr. Naghavi invented the Digital Thermal Monitoring of vascular function which provides a noninvasive, inexpensive, and easy-to-use tool for screening asymptomatic at risk patients and monitoring vascular response to therapy. Through his years of active contribution to the field of early detection and prevention of cardiovascular disease, Dr. Naghavi founded the Society for Heart Attack Prevention and Eradication (SHAPE) and is the Chairman of the SHAPE Task Force, a non-profit international coalition focusing on the advancement of cardiovascular risk assessment.