Hossein Ardehali

Hossein Ardehali is the Irving J. Levinson Professor of Cardiology, Associate Dean for Translational Research and Training, Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), Director of Translational Research Program, Associate Director of Sarver Heart Center, and Professor of Medicine, Pharmacology, Cell & Molecular Medicine, Clinical Translational Sciences, and Immunobiology at the University of Arizona. Prior to that, he was the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Cardiac Metabolism, Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, Director of the Center for Molecular Cardiology, Director of the MSTP and Director of a K12 program at Northwestern University. He also serves as the Deputy Editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) and is a past-president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), one of the most prestigious honor societies in the country.

Hossein Ardehali received his undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Utah and obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees as part of the MSTP at Vanderbilt University. He then completed his medicine residency and cardiology fellowship training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. After a brief appointment as faculty at Johns Hopkins, he moved to Northwestern University in Chicago, IL in 2005 and moved up through the ranks. He has received several awards, including the American Heart Association (AHA) Young Investigator Award, the Jeremiah Stamler Distinguished Young Investigator Award, and the Schweppe Foundation Award. He is a fellow of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and is a member of the Association of American Physicians (AAP). He has served on the editorial board of a number of journals, including JCI Insight and Circulation Research. He has published more than120 manuscripts and have publications in several high-impact journals including Cell Metabolism, Molecular Cell, Nature Cell Biology, Journal of Clinical Investigation, PNAS, Nature Communications, Circulation Research and EMBO Molecular Medicine.

Hossein Ardehali is a practicing cardiologist with a highly active basic science research lab. His lab focuses on iron metabolism and how mammalian hexokinases evolved to have unique functions that go beyond their glucose phosphorylating activity. He has focused on the role of iron in cardiovascular disease, mitochondrial iron regulation, and novel cellular processes in iron regulation. His lab was the first to identify cellular mechanisms that regulate severe iron deficiency and how this process regulates cellular metabolism and mitochondrial function. He was also the first to identify ABCB8 to mediate mitochondrial iron export, and the role of mitochondrial iron accumulation in heart failure. Finally, he recently discovered a novel pathway in iron sensing. In the field of hexokinases, his lab has generated a number of mouse models that lack specific regions of hexokinases and has shown that mitochondrial binding of hexokinase 1 is important for macrophage and T-cell inflammatory function and for the development of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.