Themistocles L. Assimes

Biography

Dr. Themistocles (Tim) Assimes, MD PhD, is a board-certified adult cardiologist and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine. Tim grew up in Montreal, Canada, where he received his medical degree from McGill University in 1994. He then pursued training in surgery for nearly two years before switching into internal medicine. He completed his residency in internal medicine as well as a masters degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill before moving to Stanford University in 2001 to pursue fellowship training in cardiology. During his fellowship and initial faculty years at Stanford University, he also completed a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Assimes currently devotes a majority of his time performing advanced population based research on the genomic causes of heart attacks and the common conditions that predispose people to heart attacks including high cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance. He has gained substantial experience collaborating with scientists at the international level by representing Stanford in large consortia meta analyzing genetic and genomic data. These efforts go beyond the standard SNP by SNP analyses and include analyses, interpretation, and integration of expression and allelic imbalance SNPs, genetic risk scores, Mendelian randomization, epigenetic, and gene set enrichment analyses for the identification of novel pathways of CHD in multi-ethnic populations. Concurrently, he teaches general cardiology as well as echocardiography to medical students, residents, and cardiology fellows-in-training at the Stanford affiliated Palo Alto VA hospital.

Research Interest

Dr. Assimes investigative focus is the design, conduct, analysis, and interpretation of human molecular epidemiology studies of complex cardiovascular disease (CVD) related traits including coronary atherosclerosis, a condition that causes heart attacks, the number one killer in the US and many other countries, and risk factors for coronary atherosclerosis. In addition to performing discovery and validation population genomic studies, Dr. Assimes uses contemporary genetic studies to gain important insight on the causal and mechanistic nature of associations between purported risk factors and adverse cardiovascular related health outcomes through instrumental variable analyses and genetic risk score association studies of intermediate phenotypes. Dr. Assimes is also actively involved in studies assessing the clinical utility of novel genetic markers in isolation or in combination with other biomarkers. Lastly, Dr. Assimes communicates the significance of genomic findings at the population level to molecular biologists who may lack a strong background in human genetics as well as human geneticists who lack a strong background in clinical medicine. His broad translational knowledge base in this respect allows him to serve as a key collaborator in multidisciplinary investigative groups involved in the design and the interpretation of important functional experiments that will shed light on the biology behind these new genetic associations, as well as clinical trials the will help further delineate the utility of genomics in clinical practice.