Valentin Fuster, PhD

Dr. Valentin Fuster is a cardiologist and scientist internationally recognized for his important contributions to cardiovascular medicine. Dr. Fuster serves as the General Director of the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research, CNIC) in Madrid, Spain, and as The Director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York. Dr. Fuster has been named Doctor Honoris Causa by 35 universities around the world. He is an author on more than 1000 articles on cardiovascular research and has an h-index of 214. Dr. Fuster is the only cardiologist to have received the highest awards for research from the four leading cardiovascular organizations the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology and the Interamerican Society of Cardiology. He has been President of the American Heart Association, President of the World Heart Federation, member of the National Academy of Medicine, member of the US NHLBI Advisory Council, and President of the Training Program of the American College of Cardiology. In 2010 Dr. Fuster started the PESA project, one of CNIC's flagship studies, that is generating an invaluable amount of clinical data from more than 4000 asymptomatic middle-aged individuals. This ambitious project has been extended until the end of 2029 to follow this priceless cohort for another decade that will allow to study in depth the connection of subclinical heart and brain diseases, that is the challenge of the coming years. Dr. Juan Domingo Gispert´s main interest is to uncover the pathophysiological events of Alzheimer’s disease in its preclinical stages to develop preventive interventions. This main goal is pursued with the use of neuroimaging techniques (PET and MRI, mostly) in combination with clinical, cognitive, genetic, environmental, lifestyle, and other biomarker data, and in close collaboration with a network of multidisciplinary researchers. Dr. Gispert serves as an Expert in Neuroimaging Analysis at the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Disease (CNIC) in Madrid, to lead the analysis of the neuroimaging data acquired in the different brain studies of the PESA cohort. He is also the Group Leader in Neuroimaging and Scientific Consultant of the neuroimaging platform of the Barcelonabeta Brain Research Center of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation and the leader of the ‘Physiology of cognition and Alzheimer's prevention’ group at the Institut Hospital del Mar d’Investigacions Mèdiques, in Barcelona (Spain). The research performed by Dr. Gispert has led to over 150 publications that have been cited more than 5000 times. He has been the PI and participated in several European projects of different programs, including H2020, JPND, IMI, and EIT. He has directed 5 Ph.D. theses and founded the spin-off company BetaScreen. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease.