The chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University will present the 2015 Leonard Leight Lecture at the University of Louisville.
Robert Harrington, MD, will speak at noon, Wednesday, Sept. 30, at the 16th Floor Conference Center of the Rudd Heart and Lung Center, 201 Abraham Flexner Way. Admission is free.
The Leonard Leight Lecture is presented annually by the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. For 30 years until 1996, Leight was a practicing cardiologist in Louisville and played a major role in developing cardiology services and bringing innovative treatment modalities in heart disease to Louisville.
The Leonard Leight Lecture series was established in 1994 and is made possible by gifts from Dr. and Mrs. Kurt Ackermann and Medical Center Cardiologists to the Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s Foundation.
The Arthur L. Bloomfield Professor of Medicine at Stanford since 2012, Harrington is an interventional cardiologist and experienced clinical investigator in the area of heart disease. At Stanford, he leads a department of 220 faculty members in 14 divisions.
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Harrington spent five years as the director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute, regarded as the world’s largest academic clinical research organization. The institute has conducted studies in 65 countries while building diverse research programs in clinical trials and health services research. He joined the faculty at Duke in 1993.
As a clinical investigator, he has worked primarily in the area of acute ischemic heart disease, or heart disease resulting from restricted blood flow to the heart muscle. He has established clinical research collaborations that involve investigators from around the world.
“My science has progressed from the focused study of thrombosis to using more broadly the tools of clinical science to answer clinical questions while finding new and innovative ways to design clinical trials and use clinical data to improve the care of patients,” Harrington said. “Society needs academic centers to step up and figure out how we are going to deliver health care while also advancing science and educating the next generation of clinical leaders.”
Harrington is a native of Massachusetts. He has an undergraduate degree in English from College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He received his medical degree from Tufts University in 1986 and completed an internship, residency and served as chief resident at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He trained in general and interventional cardiology as a fellow at Duke.
He has served as an associate editor of the American Heart Journal, an editorial board member of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and one of the editors of the 13th edition of Hurst’s the Heart, a leading textbook in cardiovascular medicine. He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians as well as a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, the Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Intervention, the American College of Chest Physicians and the European Society of Cardiology. He is a member of the board of trustees for the American College of Cardiology.
