Christopher J. O’Donnell, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA, FACC, is an internationally recognized cardiologist-investigator and global research leader in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. He received his M.D. and M.P.H. from Harvard University and completed residency (internal medicine) and fellowship (cardiology) at Massachusetts General Hospital. From 1996 to 2015, he was employed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and its landmark Framingham Heart Study (FHS). He served as associate director of FHS and as tenured senior investigator and chief of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Human Genomics Branch of the NHLBI Division of Intramural Research. From 2015 to 2021, he was chief of cardiology and director of the Center for Population Genomics in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System, where he served as co–principal investigator and chief scientist of the VA Million Veteran Program and as VA principal investigator of the All of Us Research Program.
Dr. O’Donnell is a highly regarded leader of international genomics research consortia and networks, including the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) consortium. His research team has discovered multiple novel gene variants for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, valve disease, obesity, and other cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors. In 2020, he became professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and he has served on faculties of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has authored more than 700 peer-reviewed articles and publications and has appeared in the top 1% on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers lists multiple times since 2017.
In March 2021, Dr. O’Donnell joined the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research as global head of cardiovascular and metabolism translational medicine, overseeing a large translational medicine program in drug discovery to address unmet needs in the treatment and prevention of cardiometabolic diseases and providing leadership in the application of genomics and data science to drug discovery and translation.
