Biography

A graduate of the medical school of the University of Rome, Italy, Dr. Fazio continued at the same institution with a fellowship in metabolic diseases. In 1985, he entered a PhD program in experimental medicine at the University of Siena, Italy, and completed it at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 1988, Dr. Fazio joined the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, UCSF, first as postdoctoral fellow, then as instructor in medicine. In 1993, Dr. Fazio joined the faculty of the school of medicine at Vanderbilt University as an assistant professor in the Division of Endocrinology and Diabetes. There, he co-founded the Vanderbilt Lipid Clinic and became director of the Vanderbilt Lipid Laboratory. He was promoted to associate professor in 1998, and after that he joined the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine to become the co-director of the Atherosclerosis Research Unit. He was promoted to professor in 2002. In 2011, he was appointed the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine and chief of the section of Cardiovascular Disease Prevention. In 2014, he became the inaugural William and Sonja Connor Chair of Preventive Cardiology at OHSU in Portland, OR. He directs the Center for Preventive Cardiology, an operation dedicated equally to clinical care and scientific discovery, with a registry/bio-repository as translational bridge. His clinical interest is the management of dyslipidemia. He participates in clinical trials to study the effectiveness and efficacy of lipid-lowering drugs and is involved in the determination of new mutations causing altered lipid levels in humans. Dr. Fazio’s NIH-supported research portfolio focuses on the pathogenesis of genetic dyslipidemias, the early cellular events in atherogenesis, and gene therapy approaches to atherosclerosis. He was an established investigator of the American Heart Association and has received about 20 NIH grants as either PI or co-PI. He has published over 260 papers, including original articles, reviews, editorials, and book chapters. He has been a charter member of the Study Section Atherosclerosis and Inflammation in Cardiovascular Disease of the NIH-NHLBI from 2006 to 2010. He is member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and of the Association of American Physicians. He is on the editorial board of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, Journal of Lipid Research, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, and associate editor for the Journal of Clinical Lipidology and Circulation Research. He is the current president of the American Board of Clinical Lipidology.

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