Victor J. Dzau, MD

Victor J. Dzau, M.D.

Victor J. Dzau, M.D. is Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University and President and CEO of the Duke University Health System. He is also James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Director of Molecular and Genomic Vascular Biology at Duke.

Dr. Dzau served previously as Arthur Bloomfield Professor and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Stanford. Most recently, he was the Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Physician-in-Chief and Director of Research at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston.

Dr. Dzau is widely regarded as the father of “Vascular Medicine,” a clinical discipline that treats patients with vascular disease. His academic interests are in cardiovascular translational research and mission-based education. His laboratory has studied the molecular and genetic mechanisms of cardiovascular disease and applied genomic and gene transfer technologies to develop novel therapeutic approaches. His work on the renin angiotensin system (RAS) paved the way for the contemporary understanding of RAS in cardiovascular disease and the development of RAS inhibitors (e.g. ACE inhibitor) as therapeutics. He pioneered gene therapy for vascular disease, being the first to introduce DNA decoy molecules to block transcriptions as gene therapy in vivo. He is currently advancing the novel concept of “preemptive gene therapy” using hypoxia regulated expression of heme oxygenase 1 transgene for coronary heart disease and recently has proposed the “Paracrine Hypothesis” for stem cell action in tissue repair and regeneration.

The recipient of many awards and honors, Dr. Dzau received the first Hatter Award from the Medical Research Council of South Africa in 2000. He was awarded the prestigious Gustav Nylin Medal by the Swedish Royal College of Medicine and the Swedish Cardiology Society, the Novartis Award for Hypertension Research by the American Heart Association (AHA), the 2004 Distinguished Scientist of the AHA, the 2004 Max Delbruck Medal by the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany, the 2005 Golden Door Award by the International Institute of Boston, a 2005 Ellis Island Medal of Honor by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, and 2006 Robert H. Williams Distinguished Chair of Medicine by the Association of the Professors of Medicine.

Dr. Dzau has served on numerous committees and advisory boards, including, previously, the Executive Committee of The Academy at Harvard Medical School (of which he is a founding member) and the boards of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Partners Healthcare, and the Harvard Clinical Research Institute. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Pepsico, Inc., Optobionics, Inc. and Genzyme Corporation. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Previous Chairman of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Cardiovascular Disease Advisory Committee, he served on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the NIH. In 1999, he became Editor-in-Chief for the American Physiological Society's new journal, Physiological Genomics. A founding member of the Society of Vascular Medicine and Biology and the Council of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology of the American Heart Association, Dr. Dzau was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vascular Medicine and Biology.

Dr. Dzau received his MD from McGill University in Montreal and underwent postgraduate training at Harvard Medical School. He was born in Shanghai, China, raised in Hong Kong, and is a citizen of the United States. He and his wife Ruth have been married for 34 years and are the parents of two daughters.

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