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Eric J. Topol, M.D. is a noted American cardiologist, geneticist and innovator. He is the Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, which is a National Institutes of Health funded flagship grant, to accelerate research to change medicine. He also serves as the Chief Academic Officer for Scripps Health, a Professor of Translational Genomics at The Scripps Research Institute, and was recently named The Gary and Mary West Chair of Innovative Medicine. In addition, he is a Co-Founder and serves on the Board of the West Wireless Health Institute as Vice-Chairman.

Beyond his continued role as a practicing cardiologist, his research career has been in two major areas: clinical development of new drugs and devices and genomics. Topol pioneered the development of many medications that are routinely used in medical practice including t-PA, Plavix, Angiomax, and ReoPro. He has led worldwide clinical trials in over 40 countries involving over 200,000 patients (First in series – GUSTO trials). His work in the genomics of heart attack has led to discovery of key genes (MEF2A deletion, Thrombospondin variants) which led to recognition by the American Heart Association top 10 research advances in 2001 and 2003. He has over 1000 original peer reviewed publications, and has edited over 30 books, including the Textbook of Interventional Cardiology (6th ed - Elsevier), and the Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine (3rd ed - Lippincott Williams & Wilkins). Topol gained prominence as the first physician researcher to raise questions about the safety of Vioxx.

His previous training was at the University of Rochester (medical school), University of California, San Francisco (internal medicine), and Johns Hopkins University (cardiology). Topol was a tenured Professor at the University of Michigan for 6 years. At age 36, Topol was named Chairman of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, where he is widely credited with leading its cardiovascular program to the topmost position in the US. In 2002 he founded the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. Topol left the Cleveland Clinic in 2006 to be Professor of Genetics at Case Western Reserve University. He was then recruited by Scripps Health and The Scripps Research Institute in 2007 to the post of Chief Academic Officer and Professor of Translational Genomics. In 2009, Topol worked with Gary and Mary West to create the West Wireless Health Institute, made possible by their philanthropic gift, and leads the field in developing, validating and accelerating wireless medicine.

Topol was selected as one of the 12 “Rock Stars of Science” in an article by GQ and the Geoffrey Bean Foundation in 2009. He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American College of Physicians, and the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. In 2004, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was named Doctor of the Decade by the Institute for Scientific Information for being one of the top 10 most cited medical researchers.