Vasan Ramachandran, MD, FACC, FAHA

Vasan Ramachandran, MD, FACC, FAHA, is the Founding Dean of the School of Public Health in San Antonio, Texas, a Professor of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Texas, and a Professor of Public Health at the College of Health, Community and Policy at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Previously, Ramachandran served as the Chief in the Section of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology in the Department of Medicine and as Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Boston University Schools of Medicine (BUSM) and Public Health (BUSPH). He also served as the Principal Investigator of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS, the oldest running epidemiology study in the US) between 2014 to 2022. Currently, Ramachandran is the Principal Investigator of the Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal (RURAL) Study (one of the youngest cohort studies in the US) that studies cardiovascular and rural health disparities in rural populations in the Southern Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, the 'Black Belt'. Funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), RURAL collaborates with sixteen institutions across the US, led by a cross-functional and transdisciplinary team of investigators.

Dr. Ramachandran is a cardiologist with subspecialty training in echocardiography and cardiovascular epidemiology and has a long-standing commitment to clinical epidemiological research. His personal and professional experiences have sensitized him to the necessity of active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with the diversity of fellow humans and developing a deeper understanding of their lived experiences within institutions, systems, and society. His research draws direct attention to the importance of addressing health disparities and working toward better health access, particularly the critical need to evaluate and address non-medical factors of health. 

Dr. Ramachandran's research is focused on: 1) Rural health disparities and social determinants of health. 2) Genomic and non-genomic biomarkers of cardiometabolic and CVD risk. He led FHS in studies relating multiple biomarkers to cardiometabolic and vascular risk, risk modeling, and prediction. 3) Also, has led the area of hypertension and heart failure research at Framingham and described key risk factors, developed a risk score, and described rates of progression and lifetime risk of elevated blood pressure. 4) Dr. Ramachandran has directed the echocardiography, vascular tonometry, and exercise laboratories at FHS for two decades. More recently, he introduced perturbation epidemiology into FHS, which evaluates blood pressure and heart rate resilience to standardized microstressors.