Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Consultant in Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine. His past positions include The W. Proctor Harvey Teaching Professor of Cardiology and Chief of the Division of Cardiology at Georgetown University Medical Center. Dr. Gersh received his MB, ChB, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He received his Doctor of Philosophy Degree from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dr. Gersh’s wide interests include the natural history and therapy of acute and chronic coronary artery disease, clinical electrophysiology and in particular atrial fibrillation, sudden cardiac death and syncope, cardiac stem cell therapy, and the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease in the developing world. He has published 819 manuscripts and 141 book chapters. (h-index 106) Dr. Gersh is the editor of 14 books and is on the editorial board of 25 journals including Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Nature Cardiovascular Medicine, and The European Heart Journal (Deputy Editor) He is also Editor-in-Chief of UpToDate in Cardiology. He was a member of the Advisory Board of the Reynolds Foundation, a Past Chairman of the Council of Clinical Cardiology of the American Heart Association, a member of the World Heart Federation’s Scientific and Policy Initiatives Committee (SPIC), and a former Member of the Board of Trustees of the American College of Cardiology. He has served on the Steering Committees and Data Safety Monitoring Boards of multiple clinical trials, sponsored by the National Lung and Blood Institute and other organizations. Dr. Gersh is a member of the Advisory Board of the Hatter Cardiovascular Research Institute, University of Cape Town. He is currently Chairman of the WHO Cardiovascular Working Group on ICD 11 Reclassification. Dr. Gersh is a member of the Association of University Cardiologists and a member of Medscape Business of Medicine.

Dr. Gersh’s honors include Teacher of the Year Award from the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, Mayo Clinic and numerous Visiting Professorships and Invited Lectures both nationally and internationally including the 2009 Henry Russek ACC lecture, Rene Laennec Invited Lecture and Silver Medal of the ESC (2010),the William McDonald lectureship to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, the Silberberg Memorial Lecture at the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand, the Criscitiello Visiting Professor Lecture at Tufts Medical Center, the Thomas W. Smith Lecture at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Hatter Award for “Advancement in the Cardiovascular Science” from the University College London and the University of Cape Town, the Max Holzman Lecture at the University of Zurich, and at ESC in 2013 he was designated as one of four “legends of modern cardiology”. He is an Honorary Member/Fellow of the South African Cardiac Society and the South African Heart Association, the Sociedad Chilena De Cardiologia Y Cirugia Cardiovascular, the Cardiac Society of India, and the British Cardiac Society. He is an Honorary Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. In 2014 he was named in the Thomson Reuters list of individuals with the greatest number of cited scientific papers 2002-2012.

Dr. Gersh was the 2004 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award of the AHA Council of Clinical Cardiology and the 2007 recipient of the ACC Distinguished Service Award. He received the degree of Ph.D. (honoris causa) from The University of Coimbra, Portugal in 2005. Dr. Gersh is the recipient of the 2012 James B. Herrick award of the AHA and in 2013 he was designated Master of the American College of Cardiology.