The GW Cardiovascular Institute's Board of Directors voted unanimously to expand the Cardiovascular Institute's mission to include a focus on vascular disease. With the addition of renowned faculty in vascular surgery, and natural alignment of cardiac and vascular disease prevention and treatment, the combined faculty initiatives will produce collaborative research, public and professional education, and community outreach focused on heart and vascular disease to better serve the Washington, DC region. The Institute will be rebranded as the GW Heart & Vascular Institute. Richard Neville, MD, Chief of Vascular Surgery, will serve as Co-Director of the Institute. The Women's Heart Center, ReStart DC program, and the Cheney Center for Cardiovascular Health will operate under the umbrella of the GW Heart and Vascular Institute.

This June three cardiology fellows will graduate and move forward with their careers in cardiology. We would like to congratulate Monica Mukherjee, MD; Palak Shah, MD; and Benjamin Yang, MD, on this great accomplishment! Dr. Mukherjee will join Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's cardiology faculty at Bayview Medical Center as a noninvasive cardiac attending. Dr. Mukherjee will present results from a GW Heart & Vascular Institute funded research project at the American Society of Echocardiography's annual meeting culminating her fellowship at GW. Dr. Shah will begin an advanced heart failure fellowship at the University of Michigan later this summer. Of note, Dr. Shah presented a scientific paper at the 2012 International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation annual meeting in Prague last month. Dr. Yang will continue at GW as an interventional cardiology fellow training under Dr. Jonathan Reiner and Dr. Ramesh Mazhari. We wish our graduates the best of luck in their careers!