Course Faculty

The Physiology Course Faculty

  • Yader Sandoval, MD

    Yader Sandoval, MD

    Course Director

    Dr. Sandoval is an academic interventional cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and the Co-Chair for the Center for Coronary Artery Disease at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation. He also holds the position of Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.

  • Emmanouil S. Brilakis, MD, PhD

    Emmanouil S. Brilakis, MD, PhD

    Course Director

    Dr. Brilakis is the Director of the Center for Complex Coronary Interventions at the Minneapolis Heart Institute and Chairman of the Center for Coronary Artery Disease at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation.

  • Carlos Collet, MD, PhD

    Carlos Collet, MD, PhD

    Course Director

    Dr. Collet is the Co-Director of the Catheterization Laboratory at the esteemed Cardiovascular Center OLV Aalst in Belgium.

  • Bernard De Bruyne, MD, PhD

    Bernard De Bruyne, MD, PhD

    Course Director

    Dr. De Bruyne is an interventional cardiologist at the Cardiovascular Center OLV Aalst in Belgium. He developed fractional flow reserve (FFR), as well as bolus and continuous thermodilution for assessing the coronary microcirculation. He led the FAME, FAME2, and DEFER randomized trials.

  • William Fearon, MD

    William Fearon, MD

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Fearon graduated from Dartmouth College and received his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he was elected into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society. He completed an Internal Medicine residency at Stanford University Medical Center serving an extra year as a Medical Chief Resident. He completed a General Cardiology and Interventional Cardiology fellowship at Stanford, spending his third year as the Chief Cardiology Fellow. He is currently a Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Chief of the Interventional Cardiology Section at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Chief of the Cardiology Section at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. Dr. Fearon is board certified in cardiovascular medicine and interventional cardiology, and he is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions. He has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of University Cardiologists.

    Dr. Fearon’s primary area of research interest is in coronary physiology. He has been the principal investigator of numerous multicenter clinical trials, including the FAME trials, which have resulted in multiple publications in the New England Journal of Medicine and led to worldwide adoption of the use of coronary physiology to guide revascularization decisions in the cardiac catheterization laboratory. He also derived and validated the index of microcirculatory resistance, which is now used commonly to assess coronary microvascular function. He has over 300 publications, speaks regularly at major international conferences, and serves as an Associate Editor for Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Circulation, and JACC Cardiovascular Interventions, among other journals. His research laboratory has had near continuous NIH funding and he is currently the principal investigator on an NIH grant evaluating cardiac allograft vasculopathy. He has received multiple teaching awards from Stanford University and has mentored numerous clinician-scientists. Dr. Fearon’s clinical activities include not only percutaneous coronary intervention, but also transcatheter aortic valve replacement.

  • Morton J. Kern, M.D.

    Morton J. Kern, M.D.

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Morton J Kern, MD, is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, and Chief of Cardiology at the Long Beach Veterans Administration Medical Center.

    Dr. Kern received his medical degree and completed his internship/residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York, and followed that with a fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. Before joining the University of California, Irvine, in 2006, Kern was a Professor of medicine at St. Louis University, where he was also director of the J.G. Mudd Cardiac Catheterization Lab.

    Kern is the author of several major textbooks, including The Cardiac Catheterization Handbook, which is used nationally and internationally to train physicians in the subject, and the recently published second edition of the SCAI Interventional Cardiology Board Review. His research interests include interventional cardiology education and practice, ACS, hemodynamics and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

  • Nils P. Johnson, MD, MS

    Nils P. Johnson, MD, MS

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Nils Johnson is a Professor of Medicine and holds the Weatherhead Distinguished Chair of Heart Disease at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston, Texas. After his undergraduate degree in Vancouver, he completed medical school at Columbia University in Manhattan and trained at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is an "interventional physiologist" and his research and clinical interests span both invasive (mentored by Dr. Nico Pijls in Eindhoven) and non-invasive (mentored by Dr. Lance Gould in Houston) methods. He has served as the principal investigator for international trials like CONTRAST (NCT02184117) and DEFINE-FLOW (NCT02328820).

  • Allen Jeremias, MD, MSc

    Allen Jeremias, MD, MSc

    Course Faculty

    Dr Allen Jeremias, MD, MSc is an interventional cardiologist at St. Francis Hospital, Roslyn, NY and Director of Interventional Cardiology Research and Associate Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory. He is also the Director of the Physiology Core Laboratory at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, New York, NY.

    Dr Jeremias earned his medical degree at Heinrich-Heine-University School of Medicine in Düsseldorf, Germany, and a Master of Science degree at Harvard Medical School. He completed his medical training at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Stanford University School of Medicine, as well as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School.

  • Claire E. Raphael, MBBS, PhD.

    Claire E. Raphael, MBBS, PhD.

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Raphael is a cardiologist specializing in coronary angiography and percutaneous coronary intervention. She is a certified interventional cardiologist in the United States and United Kingdom. She trained at Imperial College in London (2000-2006) and then completed internal medicine and then cardiology training at the Royal Brompton hospital and Imperial College. She completed further cardiology training at Mayo Clinic 2016-2017 and 2019-2020. She was then appointed at Cleveland Clinic Main campus as an attending interventional cardiologist 2021-2022 before returning to Mayo Clinic as an Assistant Professor and Senior Associate Consultant in 2022.

    Her clinical interests are coronary intervention (stenting), myocardial infarction (MI), coronary physiology, type 2 myocardial infarction, MI with non-obstructive coronary artery disease (MINOCA), coronary microvascular dysfunction and coronary spasm. She performs coronary atherectomy, brachytherapy, intra-coronary imaging and intra-coronary physiology.

    In 2016, she completed a PhD in intra-coronary physiology with the Royal Brompton hospital. She has published in all of the major cardiology journals including the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Circulation and the European Heart Journal. She continues to research in type 2 myocardial infarction and coronary microvascular dysfunction.

  • R. Jay Widmer, MD, PhD

    R. Jay Widmer, MD, PhD

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Widmer completed his undergraduate work at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX and his combined MD/PhD at Texas A&M Health Sciences Center in 2009. He was then accepted to the prestigious clinical research track at Mayo in Rochester, MN where he completed his Internal Medicine residency in June of 2012, followed by General Cardiology training in 2016, and Interventional & Structural Cardiology training in 2018. Dr. Widmer's areas of expertise include the treatment of coronary artery disease and coronary microvascular dysfunction.

  • Arnold Seto, MD, MPA

    Arnold Seto, MD, MPA

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Seto completed his undergraduate degree in Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School and the MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He completed Cardiology Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine where he rotated regularly at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, and Interventional Cardiology Fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He is an internationally recognized cardiologist with over 150 peer-reviewed publications, 20 book chapters, and numerous presentations at international conferences. He has been the lead investigator for several practice-changing multicenter randomized controlled trials (FAUST, RAUST), as well as contributed to DEFINE-FLAIR and DEFINE-PCI). He is presently serving as Treasurer and Executive Committee Member of the Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, the international professional society for interventional cardiology. He is also the President of the Intersocietal Accreditation Commission for Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories for 2022. He has served as Chief of Cardiology at the Long Beach VA Medical Center where he maintains an active practice. He is an Associate Clinical Professor with the University of California, Irvine and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

  • Nathaniel R. Smilowitz, MD

    Nathaniel R. Smilowitz, MD

    Course Faculty

    Dr. Nathaniel Smilowitz, MD, MS, FSCAI is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and an interventional cardiologist at NYU Langone Health and the VA New York Harbor Healthcare System. His research focuses on ischemic heart disease, specifically, ischemia and myocardial infarction in the absence of obstructive coronary arteries, and postoperative cardiovascular complications following non-cardiac surgery. He serves as the principal investigator for an NIH/NHLBI-funded study on coronary microvascular disease, and as a co-investigator for the AHA Go Red for Women Strategically Focused Research Network-funded Heart Attack Research Program to study mechanisms of myocardial infarction with non-obstructive coronary arteries. He is a Fellow of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions and the American College of Cardiology, and serves as the chair of the research and publications committee for the American College of Cardiology NCDR Chest Pain-MI Registry.

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