Meet the Team
Directors
Rose Marie Robertson, MD, FAHA
Rose Marie Robertson is the Science and Medical Officer of the American Heart Association. Prior to her current role she was the Chief Science and Medical Officer of the American Heart Association since 2003, on leave from her position as Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she joined the faculty in 1975. She received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School and trained in Cardiology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her academic research career has focused on autonomic cardiovascular control.
Email: Rose Marie Robertson, MD
Timothy O’Toole, PhD
Timothy O'Toole is part of the Bioanalytic and Biomarker Core research team. He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Diabetes and Obesity Center at the University of Louisville. He is experienced in flow cytometry, cell biology, and signal transduction and has a strong interest in cardiovascular diseases and endothelial cell biology. His research interests focus on the function and regulation of the endothelium in various disease states and his studies have looked into the effects of diabetes and pollutant exposures on cardiovascular and hematopoietic outcomes including progenitor cell number and function, immune cell responses and platelet function.
Email: Timothy O’Toole, PhD
Thomas Payne, PhD
Thomas Payne is a senior investigator working on the Cardiovascular Injury Due to Tobacco Use (Project 2) and the Cardiovascular effects of tobacco products in community-based cohorts (Project 3) projects. He is a Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology and Communicative Sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (ACT Center for Tobacco Treatment, Education and Research). He is also an investigator in the Jackson Heart Study, an NIH-supported longitudinal study of cardiovascular disease risk among African-Americans. His primary research focus has been in tobacco dependence, having contributed to other behavioral medicine efforts, particularly in the area of cardiovascular risk and disease. Over the past 25 years, his research has spanned a variety of topics related to understanding factors that predict differences in smoking behavior, mediators of nicotine dependence, such as genetic, environmental, intra- and interpersonal influences (e.g., cue reactivity, race, gender, stress, medical co-morbidities, etc.), predictors of treatment compliance and abstinence, and evaluation of treatment outcomes and dissemination efforts. He has served as a behavioral specialist in the Trials of Hypertension Prevention (TOHP-II) and has contributed to a number of publications based on the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) dataset. He has overseen a variety of clinical and research activities which have resulted in the recruitment of substantial numbers of individuals over the previous 15 years.
Email: Thomas Payne, PhD
Carlos Rodriguez, MD, MPH, FACC
Carlos Rodriguez is an investigator in the Cardiovascular Effects of Tobacco Products in Community-based Cohorts project. He was an Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Wake Forest University where his research focused on cardiovascular epidemiology, Hispanic cardiovascular health, hypertensive heart disease, and echocardiography. He is currently a full Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (COM) with a joint appointment in Epidemiology, Population Health and Internal Medicine (Cardiology). He is the principal investigator of a study aimed to identify cardiac structure and function within the HCHS/SOL cohort of Hispanics. He has served on the American Heart Association Science Advisory and Coordinating Committee and currently serves as Vice-Chair of Academic Affairs and Director of Clinical Cardiovascular Research for the Department of Cardiology at Albert Einstein COM. He is also a contributing member on several large national cohort cardiovascular epidemiologic studies and was lead chair for the American Heart Association Scientific Advisory on the Cardiovascular Health of Hispanics in the United States.
Email: Carlos Rodriguez, MD, MPH, FACC
Israel D. Sithu, PhD
Israel Sithu is a member of the research team of the Bioanalytics and Biomarker Core. He is an Assistant Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Louisville. Broadly, his research examines the molecular mechanisms of inflammatory disease process in order to inhibit progression of the disease. He has studied endothelial function and platelet activation for the last 10 years and has recently focused on examining the effect of acrolein and cigarette smoke on platelet activation and vascular dysfunction. To elaborate, his work has been focused on molecular mechanisms by which adhesion molecules such as intracellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) facilitate vascular inflammation; mechanisms of platelet activation; and effect of environmental pollutants and tobacco products on vascular functions.
Email: Israel Sithu, PhD
Sanjay Srivastava, PhD
Sanjay Srivastava is the Director of the Center’s Bioanalytical and Biomarker Core. He is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Superfund Research Center at the University of Louisville. He has spent much of his career studying the cardiovascular toxicity of aldehydes, suggesting that aldehydes generated by oxidative stress crosslink with the protein in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). His current research interest is focused on delineating the mechanisms by which environmental pollutants and tobacco products cause endothelial activation, vascular inflammation, insulin resistance and atherosclerosis. He has chaired or been a member on more than 25 NIH Study Sections, serves on the editorial board of Circulation Research and is a chartered member of Atherosclerosis and Inflammatory of the Cardiovascular System (AICS) study section at NIH.
Email: Sanjay Srivastava, PhD
Andrew C. Stokes, PhD
Andrew Stokes is an Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health and a Co-Investigator at the AHA Tobacco Center for Regulatory Science (A-TRAC). Stokes received his PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His research applies the analytic tools of demography to population health, with a focus on tobacco regulatory science. His research portfolio includes development of novel methods in tobacco epidemiology and work on the cardiopulmonary health effects of emerging tobacco products, such as electronic cigarettes. In addition to his research, Dr. Stokes serves as Deputy Editor at the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and directs the Master of Science in Population Health Research Program at Boston University.
Kandi L. Walker, PhD
Kandi Walker is part of the research team working on the Cardiovascular Injury Due to Tobacco Use (Project 2) and the Cardiovascular Effects of Tobacco Products in Community-based Cohorts (Project 3) projects. She is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Louisville. For over 15 years her work has explored the intersection between health and interpersonal communication looking at how people perceive the social world surrounding health issues. Her research primarily focuses on health, family, and interpersonal communication; specifically, her research examines how people talk and behave when an illness is present, how people perceive healthy lifestyles, and how people perceive and communicate about risky health behaviors. Her research has resulted in a book, “Talking Tobacco”, about some of the interpersonal, organizational, and mediated issues surrounding tobacco (e.g., bans, cultural issues, social media messages). She also has two other edited books about communication and health issues.
Email: Kandi Walker, PhD
Joseph Wu, MD, PhD
Joseph Wu is a co-investigator in the Cardiovascular Toxicity of Tobacco Products project (Project 1). He is the Director of Stanford Cardiovascular Institute & Simon H. Stertzer Endowed Professor in Department of Medicine (Cardiology) and Department of Radiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Wu has over 300 publications and his research delves into the biological mechanisms of patient-specific and disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). His work uses a combination of molecular/cellular biology, genomic-epigenomic-transcriptomic profiling, tissue engineering, stem cells, cellular & molecular biology, physiological testing, and molecular imaging technologies to better understand molecular and pathophysiological processes. He was a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award in 2008, the NIH Roadmap Transformative R01 Award in 2009 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama at the White House 2010. He is the immediate past chairman of the AHA Research Committee and is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Keystone Symposia, FDA Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee and the AHA National Board of Directors.
Email: Joseph Wu, MD, PhD
Project/Core Contacts
Jennifer Hall, PhD
Jennifer Hall serves as the Chief of Data Science of the American Heart Association. Dr. Hall is also an adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. In her roles at the AHA, she is responsible for directing an innovative research program in data science and strategizing solutions that enable the research community to test questions of the highest impact using the most effective and novel approaches. Dr. Hall is responsible for overall data management and data analysis for ATRAC. The data is managed in a central location in secure workspaces on the AHA Precision Medicine Platform to enhance collaboration across projects, data curation, method and tool development.
Email: Jennifer L. Hall, PhD
Laura Norris
Laura Norris is the Program Manager for the ATRAC grant and has been with the American Heart Association for seven years. As the Program Manager she is responsible for managing the Center’s business and financial affairs, facilitating all necessary procurement, and monitoring budget pipelines and coordinating activities between the partner institutions. She also serves as the Center’s liaison with all AHA administrative departments, including finance, procurement, legal and government grants to ensure the Center is in compliance with internal policies and sponsor regulations. Ms. Norris obtained a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Texas Tech University.
Email: [email protected]
Juan Zhao, PhD
Juan Zhao is AHA’s Director of Data Science, with a research focus and expertise in data science, machine learning, and computational approaches to improve healthcare and reduce disparities. She has published numerous studies on leveraging novel statistical and machine learning approaches on precision medicine and investigating algorithmic bias and fairness for prediction models. Prior to joining the AHA, Dr. Zhao was an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where she served as a PI and co-investigator in multiple AHA, NIH and FDA grants. She also serves as editors and reviewers in many journals and conferences. At ATRAC, Dr. Zhao oversees and develops new methods for combining clinical, biomarker, and mobile technology data to identify the short- and long-term effects of e-cigarette product use on cardiovascular and pulmonary physiology in Project 2.
Email: Juan (Wendy) Zhao, PhD