Arya Mani, MD, FACC, FAHA

Arya Mani, MD, director of the Yale Medicine Cardiovascular Genetics Program, is a leading expert on the genetic causes of heart disease. An interest in the genetics of disease and a desire to improve outcomes for cardiac patients led him into his field. “I wanted to make a change not only by diagnosing and healing patients, but also by identifying causes and treatments of disease,” he says.

Through collaborative efforts with physicians and scientists across the world, he has been involved in recruiting large populations of patients and families with early onset coronary artery disease and metabolic syndrome, and in the course of working with them has successfully mapped and identified a number of novel genes for these diseases.

An associate professor of medicine (cardiology) and of genetics at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Mani studies the role of genetics in disease and the use of genomic knowledge in identifying disease pathways, the sequence of actions within a cell that lead to illness. He has helped identify genes that cause early onset coronary artery disease, metabolic syndrome and several adult congenital disorders.

While he enjoys research, Dr. Mani also loves working with patients and seeing them get better. “It is a joy to see that you’ve had an impact on people’s lives,” he says. “I don’t want to miss a moment of it.”