Biography

Dr Daniel Levy is chief of the population sciences branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and director of the Framingham Heart Study. Dr Levy’s main areas of research interest include the epidemiology and genetics of hypertension, heart disease and heart failure. He is spearheading a research program known as the SABRe CVD Initiative (Systems Approach to Biomarker Research in Cardiovascular Disease) that seeks to identify new biomarkers and pathways involved in cardiovascular disease through gene expression profiling and discovery proteomics and metabolomics. These resources will be united with Framingham’s unparalleled genetic and phenotypic databases and will be made freely accessible to the public. In addition to his research and administrative responsibilities, Dr Levy has become actively involved as a policy maker. He served with the National High Blood Pressure Education Program and the National Cholesterol Education Program in the formulation of national hypertension and cholesterol guidelines. He recently served on the committee that authored new cholesterol guidelines and risk assessment methods for those guidelines. Dr Levy received a BA degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an MD degree from Boston University School of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine at University Hospital, Boston and a research fellowship in cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard School of Public Health. He joined the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the Framingham Heart Study in 1984 and became the Study’s fourth director in 1994. In 2005, he returned to the classroom as a fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School. Dr Levy has a faculty appointment at Boston University School of Medicine, where he is professor of medicine and he holds an adjunct appointment at Harvard Medical School. Dr Levy has been the recipient of many awards and twice received the National Institutes of Health Director’s award for his research accomplishments. In November 2009, he was the recipient of the American Heart Association’s highest recognition for research achievements in epidemiology, the population research prize. In 2014, he was named by Thomson Reuters as one of the world’s "best and brightest scientific minds of our time." Dr Levy has mentored scores of research fellows and has published over 400 articles in leading medical journals. He authored a book about the revolution in understanding of heart disease titled "A Change of Heart" (published by Alfred A. Knopf), and is editor in Chief of the journal Current Cardiovascular Risk Reports. Dr. Levy is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and of the American Heart Association.

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