Dr. Bettina Heidecker, MD, the MF 2007 Fellowship Grant Recipient and a member of the Myocarditis Foundation’s Medical Advisory Board, has recently been asked to join the Charite Campus Benjamin Franklin in Berlin as the head of heart failure and cardiomyopathies. The Charite University 
Hospital complex is one of Europe’s largest clinics and has a long history with the first of its hospitals established in 1710. More than half of Germany’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology have worked there. Dr. Heidecker will be working alongside highly esteemed physicians and cardiologists. She will not only work in the clinical setting caring for patients with heart failure and cardiomyopathies, but will be teaching the next generation of physicians about myocarditis and its many forms of clinical presentation. Dr. Heidecker’s plan is to also establish a research laboratory at the Charite, to continue her work looking for an early detection tool for myocarditis and improved therapies for the disease.
While at the University of Zurich, where she worked as a non-invasive cardiologist since 2015, she established a specialty clinic for myocarditis. Dr. Heidecker, with her clinical research team, also introduced a screening algorithm that increased the number of detected cases with myocarditis per year significantly. The data will be published in an upcoming Journal of the American College of Cardiology Heart Failure.
Dr. Heidecker has earned many awards internationally dating back to 2000, and is a very highly published author on myocarditis and cardiomyopathies and also has written book chapters on Acute Fulminant Myocarditis (along with Dr. Leslie Cooper, of the Mayo Clinic) and a chapter in The Handbook of Genomic Medicine (along with Dr. Joshua Hare, of the University of Miami).
Dr. Heidecker will also be the principal investigator of the European arm of the Myocarditis Foundation’s “Myocarditis Registry and Bio-bank”.
The Myocarditis Foundation wishes all our best to Dr. Heidecker and we look to her to be one of the major players in myocarditis care and research in the next 20 years.
Congratulations Dr. Heidecker!
