E. Douglas Lewandowski

Biography

Dr. Lewandowski holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from the University of Chicago. He received his Master of Science in Physiology from the University of Illinois and completed his Ph.D. in Radiological Sciences at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. After his first faculty appointment in the Section of Cardiology, Department of Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, he joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School with an appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. In 2000, Lewandowski became professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the Department of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Before arriving at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute at Lake Nona (SBP), he was the director of the UIC Center for Cardiovascular Research and also served as the interim head of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. Currently, he is a professor in the Center for the Metabolic Origins of Disease and director of Cardiovascular Translational Research at SBP, with a joint appointment at Florida Hospital as senior principal investigator at the Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes (TRI-MD). Lewandowski’s research contributions have been recognized with numerous awards and he has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1993 and has received an NIH MERIT award. He is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physiological Society, and the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR). He maintains editorial board appointments to prestigious scientific publications including Circulation, Circulation Research, and the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology. His innovative research program examines cardiovascular physiology and biochemistry in intact tissues through combined nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, along with metabolic regulation by metabolic gene expression.

Research Interest

Dr. Lewandowski has longstanding expertise in the field of cardiac metabolism, exploring the metabolic basis of contractile dysfunction in diseased hearts. He has pioneered novel stable isotope methodologies for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) detection for quantitative assessment of metabolic flux and detection of intracellular enzyme and transporter activity within intact beating hearts. Multidisciplinary research protocols assess metabolic activity in the intact beating heart during health and disease, combined with medical imaging techniques, and the manipulation of metabolic enzyme activity/expression in the failing heart with both pharmacological support and targeted gene therapy. A particular focus has been the dynamics of lipid metabolism in the heart, elucidating shifts in the reciprocal mechanisms of lipid storage and oxidation that influence underlying mechanisms of lipolytic signaling for gene activation and the formation of physiologically active or lipotoxic lipid intermediates.