Sunil V. Rao

Dr. Rao is Professor of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center, and the Section Chief of Cardiology at the Durham VA Medical Center. At the national level, Dr. Rao serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Circulation Cardiovascular Interventions, the interventional journal of the American Heart Association’s flagship Circulation family of journals. He also serves on the program committees of the ACC Scientific Sessions, the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference, and the SCAI Scientific Sessions. He was the chairman of the 2017 ACC-i2 Summit and is the chair of the SCAI 2019 Annual Scientific Session. In addition, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the ACC CathSAP 5 program and is currently the co-chair of the ACC Collaborative Management Pathway. His main research interests are pharmacological and interventional therapies for acute coronary syndromes, as well as bleeding and blood transfusion complications among patients with ischemic heart disease. Dr. Rao has been the Principal Investigator of several randomized clinical trials including the first registry-based randomized trial performed in the United States titled the “SAFE-PCI for Women” trial comparing radial and femoral approaches to PCI in women. He is the Principal Investigator for the Coordinating Center for the National Institute on Aging’s Partnership for Anemia: Clinical and Translational Trials in the Elderly (PACTTE). He is also a coinvestigator on the ACC-funded National Cardiovascular Data Registry’s (ACC-NCDR) CathPCI registry and serves on its Steering Committee and Research and Publications Committee.