Prof. Dr. Elena Aikawa

Elena Aikawa is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also Co-Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Sciences (CICS), Founding Director of the Heart Valve Translational Research Program (HVTRP), and Associate Head of the Section of Cardiovascular Life Sciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She received her medical degree from the First Moscow Medical Institute, Moscow, Russia in 1984, and obtained a Ph.D. in pathology from the Institute of Biophysics, Moscow in 1989. She joined Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Boston in 1991. Her research focuses on the pathogenesis of valvular heart disease and the mechanisms of cardiovascular calcification. She co-founded the BWH Committee for Internationally Trained Women Faculty in 2004 and founded the annual Women in Medicine and Science Symposium at BWH in 2012.  In 2018, she was elected as Vice-Chair and in 2020 as Chair of the Women’s Leadership Committee of the American Heart Association (AHA) Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology.  In 2016-2021, she was elected as President of the International Society for Applied Cardiovascular Biology (ISACB).  She served as the society’s first female president.