Vasan Ramachandran, MD
Founding Dean and Professor of The University of Texas School of Public Health San Antonio
Vasan Ramachandran, MD, a distinguished public health researcher from Boston University, was named founding dean of The University of Texas School of Public Health San Antonio in September 2022. The new school is a strategic collaboration of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and is one of three schools of public health in The University of Texas System.
Ramachandran served on the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine and School of Public Health for more than a quarter-century and as principal investigator of the Framingham Heart Study between 2014 and 2022. The Framingham study is a population-based, observational cohort study initiated by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1948, and subsequently funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to prospectively investigate the epidemiology and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. It has grown into an ongoing, longitudinal study gathering prospective data on a wide variety of biological and lifestyle risk factors, and cardiovascular, neurological, and other types of disease outcomes across three generations of participants and its accompanying Omni cohorts of non-white individuals.
Ramachandran has also served since 2019 as one of the principal investigators for the Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal Study (RURAL) aimed at addressing critical gaps in the knowledge of heart and lung disorders in rural counties in the southeastern U.S. This study is of 4,600 individuals aged 25-64 from 10 rural counties in Southern Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta.
Most recently, Ramachandran leads the Community Engagement for Building Capacity, Trust, and Ownership of Research (CONNECTOR) initiative. This initiative, funded by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is designed to advance research that benefits historically underrepresented communities. The team is developing a resource center for community engagement and plays a central role in the Health Equity Research Network (HERN) on Community-Driven Research, the fourth health equity network funded by the AHA. Ramachandran is a well-funded and collaborative investigator. He has nearly 1200 publications, including many in prominent journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Circulation.