Translational research may be one of the latest buzzwords in academic medicine, but it's something Douglas P. Zipes, MD, HS'64-'68, has been doing since day one of his 40-year career. “It just came naturally to me,” he explains. “It was extremely gratifying to have one foot in the experimental lab and another at the bedside.” Although the field of electrophysiology was fairly new at the time, Zipes became fascinated with the physiology of cardiac arrhythmias during his cardiology fellowship at Duke. “Even back then you could understand mechanisms of a patient's arrhythmia, which could then be applied to the care of the patient.” After joining the faculty at Indiana University in 1970, he went on to establish Indiana 's first invasive clinical electrophysiology laboratory. He stepped down as chief of cardiology in 2004, and to celebrate his tenure the university endowed the Medtronic Zipes Chair in Cardiology and the Joan and Douglas Zipes Visiting Professorship. The American College of Cardiology honored his commitment to education by creating the distinguished young scientist award in his name. Zipes was the founding editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology and is now the founding editor of Heart Rhythm, the journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, which has endowed an annual lecture in his name. He is co-editor of two text books— Cardiac Electrophysiology: From Cell to Bedside and Braunwald's Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine —and is currently working on a third. His interests outside of medicine include fiction writing, and he hopes to have a novel published soon.

 

Current title: Distinguished Professor, Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Emeritus Director of the Division of Cardiology and Krannert Institute of Cardiology, Indiana University School of Medicine

 

Education: Dartmouth College , Harvard Medical School

 

Training: Duke

 

Personal: He and his wife Joan have three children—Debra, Jeffrey, and David—and live in Carmel , Ind.