Dr. Min Xie is a physician-scientist and cardiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He graduated from the Shandong Medical University in China and later joined the Ph.D. program of the DeBakey Heart Center at Baylor College of Medicine. After getting his Ph.D., he did his medical training at the UTSW Medical Center. He did a postdoc in Dr. Joseph Hill’s lab. He found that histone deacetylase inhibitor-induced autophagy protected the rabbit heart from cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury. He also discovered that inducing autophagy, specifically by Tat-Beclin 1, reduces infarct size in mouse myocardial infarction model. After graduating from his cardiology fellowship, he established his lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In this paper, Dr. Xie and his team found that Tat-Beclin 1 maintains mitochondrial homeostasis during cardiac ischemia/reperfusion injury as a mechanism of Tat-Beclin 1’s cardioprotective effects. As a physician-scientist, he enjoys doing cardiac research and taking care of cardiac patients.