Program Director
E. Douglas Lewandowski, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Cardiovascular Research
Director, Program in Integrative Cardiac Metabolism
Professor, Department of Physiology and Biophysics and Department of Medicine (Cardiology),
University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Medicine
Dr. Lewandowski is the Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Research (CCVR) and also directs the Program in Integrative Cardiac Metabolism (PICM), one of the units of the CCVR. Dr. Lewandowski is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and in the Department of Medicine, Section of Cardiology, and is an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering. His own research examines the metabolic basis of impaired heart function in the development of heart failure, ischemic heart disease, and diabetic cardiomyopathy. Active research protocols visualize and measure metabolic activity in the intact beating heart during health and disease, combined with medical imaging techniques, and manipulate metabolic activity in the ailing heart with both pharmacological support and targeted gene delivery. He maintains an active schedule as an invited lecturer at universities and professional societies around the world.
Dr. Lewandowski is a fellow of both the American Heart Association and American Physiological Society. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the medical and scientific journals, Circulation, Circulation Research, Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, and Frontiers in Fatty Acid and Lipid Phyiosology, and served fifteen years on the editorial board of the American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology. He ahs also served as guest editor for Circulation. He is the past chairman of the Interest Group in Cardiac Metabolism of the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR), and was an elected councilor of the ISHR American Section. He was also the founder and chairman of the Dynamic NMR Spectroscopy Study Group of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Dr. Lewandowski has chaired or served as a member of many professional review panels and grant review committees, both nationally and internationally.
He has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1993, and is a recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the NIH and an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association. He was the inaugural recipient of the Young Investigator's Award from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine for his work in the use of carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to monitor metabolic flux and enzyme activity in the intact, beating heart.
Dr. Lewandowski began his work at UIC in 2001, after a decade on the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an Assistant and then Associate Professor, with hospital appointments in Radiology and Cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. Prior to his time in Boston, he spent five years at his first faculty appointment in Cardiology in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. Dr. Lewandowski received his Ph.D. degree in Radiological Sciences at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, specializing in cardiac biochemistry and magnetic resonance, after receiving an M.S. degree in Physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a B.A. in Biology from the University of Chicago in 1979 as an Argonne National Laboratory Scholar.
