2023 Dickinson W. Richards Memorial Lecturer - Evangelos Michelakis, MD, FAHA, FACC

Dr. Evangelos Michelakis was born in Greece, where he attended medical school at the University of Patras. He completed training in vascular biology, internal medicine, and cardiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Yale University, and the University of Minnesota. He has been at the University of Alberta in Canada since 1998 where he is now Professor and Vice Chair (Research) for the Department of Medicine. He is the Canada Research Chair (I) in Applied Molecular and Mitochondrial Medicine.

Dr. Michelakis is an active clinician cardiologist specializing in pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular failure. His research is mostly translational in animals, but he has also translated his findings in early-phase clinical trials. His work focuses on the role of mitochondria and metabolism in diverse diseases like pulmonary hypertension, heart failure and cancer. He proposed the Metabolic Theory of Pulmonary Hypertension and published the first clinical trial of a mitochondria-activating drug in patients with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension in Science Translational Medicine, where he had also previously published the first trial of a mitochondrial targeting drug in patients with glioblastoma. He also does molecular biology research on the role of mitochondria in nuclear function and epigenetic regulation. He has been published in journals like Cell, Cancer Cell, Molecular Cell, Cell Metabolism, Cell Reports, PNAS, JCI, Circulation, and Circulation Research.

Dr. Michelakis has served as the Chair of the Council on Cardiopulmonary, Critical Care, Perioperative and Resuscitation (3CPR) and delivered the Kenneth D. Bloch Memorial Lecture in Vascular Discovery in 2019. He is a Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.