David Christini, PhD
Senior Vice President for Research
Dr. David Christini serves as the Senior Vice President for Research at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University.
Dr. Christini, a Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology, is the author of nearly a hundred peer-reviewed publications and has four issued US patents. He has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2004 and has also received funding from the NSF, the American Heart Association, and various foundations and organizations. He served as the Program Director on two NIH-funded training grants. He has served on multiple NIH and NSF review panels, serves as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Physiology, has served as a referee for more than 30 professional journals, and was elected as the co-Chair of the 2021 Gordon Conference on Cardiac Arrhythmia Mechanisms.
His research group is focused on improving the understanding of, and therapies for, cardiac arrhythmias. They primarily investigate biophysical mechanisms of electrophysiological instabilities and arrhythmia onset, from the subcellular to organ level. Because of the complexity of electrophysiological dynamics (both temporal and spatiotemporal), the team uses a multiscale approach that bridges the gap between physics and biology. Their experiments employ electrophysiological and imaging modalities, primarily at the cellular and tissue levels; they then use the experimental data to inform computational cardiac modeling that scales up from the single cell to the whole organ.
Prior to joining Downstate in June 2020, Dr. Christini was a tenured Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. At Weill Cornell, he was Vice Dean of the Weill Cornell Graduate School. He also served as Director of the Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Computational Biology & Medicine from its founding in 2003 until 2019, Assistant Dean of Scientific Computing, Vice Chair of Basic Research in the Department of Medicine, and Director of Basic Cardiovascular Research.
Dr. Christini holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and both his Masters and Doctoral degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University.
From explorations focused on the development of new treatments and therapeutics to faculty and student-led research driving groundbreaking innovations in health and medicine, Dr. Christini is charged with developing, supporting, and driving strategic research programs at Downstate across a broad spectrum of interests from the basic sciences, to translational research, to clinical trials, to population research and health equity.
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