Weintraub named MCG cardiology chief

Dr. Neal L. Weintraub, a federally funded physician-scientist who is associate director of the Vascular Biology Center at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, is the new chief of the Division of Cardiology in the MCG Department of Medicine.

Weintraub, Georgia Research Alliance Herbert S. Kupperman Eminent Scholar in Cardiovascular Medicine, has served as interim division chief since June.

Weintraub is associate editor of Translational Research and a longtime editorial board member of the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. He also is on the editorial board of Cardiovascular Research and a review editor for Frontiers in Physiology (Integrative  Physiology) and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine (Cardio-Oncology). Weintraub has regularly served on various National Institutes of Health study sections and special emphasis panels over the past 20 years, including chairing the Health Cardiovascular Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer study section three times in the past two years. He is a past president of the Central Society for Clinical Research.

His current research includes clinical trials using matching donor mesenchymal precursor cells to attempt to improve heart function in patients with congestive heart failure. His NIH-funded basic science studies include improving fat cell function in obesity to reduce cardiovascular and diabetes risk, exploring how aging fat contributes to Alzheimer’s disease, developing medical therapies to treat abdominal aortic aneurysms, and advancing stem cell therapies for heart disease and to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He is author or co-author on nearly 200 publications on his scientific pursuits. His clinical interests include heart failure, aortic diseases and all aspects of clinical cardiology.

At MCG, he has chaired recent search committees for neuroscience and physiology department chairs and helped with other recent key recruits, such as the Department of Medicine chair and cardiothoracic surgery chief. He has served on the MD/PhD Admissions Committee since 2015.

Weintraub came to MCG in 2013 from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he was director of the Cardiovascular Division and co-director of the Cardiovascular Center of Excellence. He was born in Albany, Georgia, and is a 1984 graduate of Tulane University School of Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency at Emory University and the University of Illinois and a cardiovascular disease fellowship and postdoctoral research fellowship at Saint Louis University.