After a national search, Dr. Geoffrey Stuart Pitt has been appointed to Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute (CVRI) at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Pitt will be joining the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Division of Cardiology as the Ida and Theo Rossi Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Weill Department of Medicine in July of 2016. As Director of the CVRI, he will lead and direct the basic and translational research program focused on cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular sciences at WCM.
Geoffrey Pitt, M.D., Ph.D.
A nationally and internationally recognized authority on calcium signaling and ion channels, he received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.D., and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed both internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship training at Stanford University Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Pitt served at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine and as the Esther Aboodi Assistant Professor of Medicine. He subsequently joined Duke University in 2007, where he has served as the Director of the Ion Channel Research Unit, the Associate Director and Interim Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, the Vice Chief of Basic Science, and the Co-Director of the Mandel Cardiovascular Center.
Dr. Pitt's research team has made many important findings in understanding the structure and function of ion channels and their regulatory subunits in the heart and brain. His team's ground-breaking electrophysiology, biochemistry, structural biology work has illuminated several mutations that lead to inherited channelopathies such as ventricular tachycardia and epilepsy and has begun to point to potential therapies for such conditions. Dr. Pitt's experience leading a successful cardiovascular T32 training program will be invaluable to WCM as we build up our own program to train the next generation of cardiovascular investigators.
An elected member of The Association of American Physicians, Dr. Pitt is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the Vice Chair of the American Heart Association's Mid-Atlantic Affiliate Research Committee. In 2015, he was honored with the Harrington Discovery Institute Scholar-Innovator Award. Dr. Pitt has published numerous papers in the top tier peer-review journals and has received robust research funding from the NIH and the American Heart Association.
The Weill Department of Medicine is delighted to welcome Dr. Geoffrey Stuart Pitt as the newly appointed Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute.