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Academic Advisors

Vinod H. Thourani MD, FACS, FACC

Academic Advisor

Dr. Vinod Thourani is the Bernie Marcus Chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Piedmont Healthcare and the Marcus Heart and Vascular and Valve Center of the Piedmont Heart Institute (PHI) in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also the Surgical Director of the PHI Structural Center of
Excellence.

He is Past-President of the International Society of Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS, 2022-2023), Past-President of the Heart Valve Society (2020-2022), Past-President of the Southern Thoracic Surgical Association (2019-2021), and Past-President of the South Atlantic Cardiovascular Society (2019-2021). He serves on the Board of Directors and the Executive committee of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) and is the Treasurer (2022 2025). He is the President-Elect of the 21 Century Cardiothoracic Surgical Society (2024-2025). He is on the Board of Trustees and Executive Committee of ISMICS, Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the Heart Valve Society, Board of Directors for the Heart Valve Voice, Board of Directors for the South Atlantic Cardiovascular Society, and is on the Surgeons Council of the American College of Cardiology. He is chair of the National STS/ACC National Transcatheter Valve Therapies (TVT) database (2023-2026) and is the past-chair of the STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database Research Task Force. He is a Senior Editor for the Annals of Thoracic Surgery and the Associate Editor the Heart Valve Society Journal, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Innovations, Journal of Heart Valve Disease, Journal of Cardiac Surgery, Texas Heart Journal, and Cardiovascular Revascularization Medicine. Dr. Thourani has authored 766 peer-reviewed articles, including 15 papers in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. He is Principal Investigator or on the steering
committee for 10 research trials in the U.S. and is on the steering committee of the National Institutes of Health Cardiothoracic Surgery Network. He specializes in adult cardiac surgery and has a busy clinical schedule with over 500 open and transcatheter cardiac cases per year. Specifically, he is passionate
about working with a multidisciplinary team allowing options for traditional, minimally invasive, and transcatheter surgical options.

Mark C. Poznansky M.D., Ph.D., F.R.C.P, F.I.D.S.A.

Academic Advisor

Dr. Poznansky is a medical innovator whose work bridges academic discovery and clinical care. As a leader in the field of leukocyte migration and the modulation of leukocyte trafficking and function, he has linked discovery with the development of new vaccines and immunotherapies for cancer, pandemic viruses and immune mediated diseases including type 1 diabetes and ALS. Dr. Poznansky has gained national and international recognition for establishing a new model for translational research that accelerates the process by which basic biological discoveries move towards products and technologies that improve patient care and treatment. Since 2008 he has served as the founder and director of the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center (VIC) at MGH, which is putting this model into practice. The goal of VIC is to enable efficient and rapid transition of promising technologies through preclinical development and into the clinical stage of development through technology spin outs, partnerships or out licensing. He oversees the research work of a large team of investigators, postdoctoral fellows and other trainees addressing key research questions regarding these new therapeutics and vaccines and leads an operational team that facilitates the execution of business, regulatory, manufacturing, and other product development tasks associated with the preclinical translation of these candidates. VIC currently has 9 vaccines and immunotherapies in development, including a new B cell therapy for neuroinjury and neurodegenerative diseases and new self-assembling T cell targeted therapeutic vaccine for cervical cancer. Four of these technologies have recently reached large animal preclinical or first in human testing. The team at VIC has also developed a novel high dimensional immunology program that uses state of the art omics technologies to define broad immune profiles in cancer, infectious and immune mediated diseases to inform diagnosis, clinical decision making and vaccine and immunotherapy design. Dr. Poznansky is the scientific founder of Celtaxys, ACTx, Vicapsys, Aperisys, Voltron Therapeutics and Cellibrium.