Benjamin Scirica

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, USA

Dr. Benjamin Scirica is a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Senior Investigator at the TIMI Study Group and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is Director of Innovation in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Program Lead of the Remote Health/Digital Care Transformation Group at Mass General Brigham, a group that has developed a series of remote disease management programs.

Dr. Scirica graduated from Harvard Medical School and trained in internal medicine and cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and has a Master of Public Health degree from Harvard School of Public Health. His research interests center on the identification and application of novel therapeutic and care delivery strategies across the spectrum of cardiometabolic disease. He was principal investigator of the AVANT GARDE-TIMI 43 trial and CAMELLIA-TIMI 61 and co-investigator of the MERLIN-TIMI 36, TRA 2Pº-TIMI 50, and SAVOR-TIMI 53 trials.  Dr. Scirica has authored or co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles that have been published in The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Circulation and Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC). 

John Deanfield

University College, London, UK

John Deanfield FRCP FESC is a Professor of Cardiology at University College London. He is Director of the National Institute of Cardiovascular Outcomes Research (NICOR) in the UK and was a Senior Advisor to the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (formally Public Health England) on cardiovascular disease prevention. In his role within NICOR, Deanfield has played a leading role in the use of national data to improve outcomes from heart disease. He has championed the idea of lifetime benefits of sustained management of cardiovascular risk factors and comorbidities, introducing the concept of 'investing in your arteries'.

Deanfield's career has focused on the management of heart disease across the lifetime of an individual. He completed his clinical training at the Middlesex Hospital London. He then carried out his postgraduate training at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in paediatric cardiology and at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School Hammersmith Hospital, London, in adult cardiology, which allowed him to understand cardiovascular disease in its different stages and progression.

Deanfield was appointed a Consultant Cardiologist at GOSH in 1984. A key contributor to the new speciality of Adult Congenital Heart Disease, he chaired the National and International Practice Guidelines, including the European Society of Cardiology Task Force for Grown Up Congenital Heart Disease (GUCH) (2003). At The National Heart Hospital, he developed one of the largest programmes for Adult Congenital Heart Disease (ACHD/GUCH) in the world, which was transferred to create a new unit at the new Barts Heart Centre in 2015. He chaired the Standards Committee for Adults in the UK National ‘Safe and Sustainable’ Review of Congenital Heart Disease services in 2014 and advised on subsequent implementation.

As Director of NICOR since 2011, Deanfield oversees one of the largest longitudinal set of cardiovascular electronic health records in the world, providing UK-wide data for NHS Quality Improvement, research and public engagement. He has actively worked towards improvements to cardiology, working on prevention, clinical care and the evaluation of outcomes.

He has published more than 520  research articles (H-index 140, citations >139K), ranging across the consequences of congenital heart disease to the early onset of acquired cardiovascular disease in adults. Deanfield developed a non-invasive technique to study the factors responsible for early arterial disease and its response to treatment. In 2014, he chaired the JBS3 Cardiovascular Prevention Guidelines, introducing the concept of ‘investing in your arteries’ to communicate with patients. This in turn led to the development in 2018 of the Heart Age Calculator to extend this messaging to the general public, in collaboration with PHE and NHS England.  He is currently Chairing the development of the JBS4 guidelines.   Deanfield co-chaired the Expert Scientific and Clinical Advisory Panel (ESCAP) for the Health Check Programme in PHE as well as the Academic Group on Healthy Ageing in PHE.

Deanfield was awarded a British Heart Foundation Chair to study cardiovascular disease prevention (2003-2018). He became adjunct Professor at Yale University, New Haven USA in 2009 and was given an Einstein Professorship (2018-2021) at the Hospital Charite Universitätsmedizin Berlin to study Artificial Intelligence in large scale cardiovascular data. Deanfield was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2001, and in 2017 he was awarded the British Cardiovascular Society Mackenzie medal in recognition of outstanding service to British Cardiology.   In 2021 he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Deanfield sits on the Medical Advisory Committees and Boards of a number of healthcare companies. He is Chief Medical Advisor to the new national early disease detection programme, ‘Our Future Health’ (2020) and Chaired the National Health Check Programme Review that was published in 2021. His charity positions include membership of the Medical Advisory Board of the Chain of Hope Charity and Academic Committee Chair of Heart(UK). For many years, Deanfield was Medical Advisor to the Somerville Foundation for Adult Congenital Heart Disease patients.