Dr. Bettina Heidecker has been on our Medical Advisory Board since 2016 and has now transitioned to our Board of Directors.
Dr. Heidecker graduated from Innsbruck Medical School, Austria in 2006, after which she started her Post-Doctorate training at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. There she was one of the first investigators to specialize in high-throughput technologies and machine learning in the field of cardiovascular medicine. Early on in her career, her aim was to improve patient care by finding a personalized approach. In 2007, she published the article “The use of transcriptomic biomarkers for personalized medicine”, in which she explained how machine learning – just one of the methods used in artificial intelligence – can help us identify personalized biomarkers more efficiently. When her mentor Joshua Hare, MD was recruited to the University of Miami, she followed him and continued her research in the field. From the beginning of her career, a main focus was myocarditis, and she became one of our first grant recipients. In addition, she has received numerous prestigious awards including the Paul Dudley White International Scholar Award, AHA, the Jay N. Cohn New Investigator Integrative Physiology/Clinical Award, HFSA, and the Samuel A. Levine Clinical Young Investigator Award, AHA.
After 3 years of Post-Doctorate Training, she joined the residency training program in internal medicine at the University of Miami and her clinical fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at the University of California San Francisco. Dr. Heidecker received board certification in internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, and echocardiography from the American Board of Internal Medicine and the National Board of Echocardiography, US. Throughout her clinical training, she continued her research in the field of myocarditis, supported our foundation, and joined our meetings.
Following her clinical training, Dr. Heidecker returned to Europe, where she joined Thomas F. Lüscher, MD as a cardiologist at the University Hospital Zurich. With his support, she established a clinic for myocarditis, a highly productive research team and a biobank for myocarditis. Many publications in the field of myocarditis resulted from that time.
In 2018, Dr. Heidecker accepted a position in the division of cardiology at the Charite, University Hospital Berlin led by Ulf. Landmesser, MD, where she became the head of heart failure and cardiomyopathies at the Campus Benjamin Franklin. Myocarditis continues to be her main subject of research, with the goal to detect the disease at an early stage and to treat it with a personalized approach to get the best possible outcome for each individual patient.
The Foundation is very happy to now have her as a member of our Board of Directors!
