Dr. Eric Peterson is an internationally acclaimed leader in cardiovascular clinical research and a distinguished academic physician-scientist. He currently serves as Professor of Internal Medicine, Vice Provost and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research, and Vice President for Health System Research at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he holds the Adelyn and Edmund M. Hoffman Distinguished Chair in Medical Science. Prior to joining UT Southwestern in 2020, Dr. Peterson was the Fred Cobb Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Duke University and served as Executive Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute from 2012-2018. His educational journey includes an undergraduate degree in neurobiology from Northwestern University, medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh, residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and fellowship training in general internal medicine at Harvard University and cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, complemented by a Master's in Public Health from Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Peterson has established himself as a preeminent figure in cardiovascular outcomes research through his leadership of multiple national registries and clinical trials that have fundamentally shaped quality assessment and improvement in cardiac care. He serves as Principal Investigator for the Analytic Centers of the American College of Cardiology's National Cardiac Database, the American Heart Association's Get With the Guidelines Database, and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons' National Cardiac Surgery Database, while also leading the NHLBI's SPIRRIT trial in heart failure. With more than 1,500 peer-reviewed publications, he ranks among the top 1 percent of published researchers in clinical medicine and has been consistently recognized as one of the world's most highly cited researchers. His research program has focused on identifying care gaps through sophisticated analytic methods and designing interventions to address disparities in cardiovascular care among vulnerable populations including racial minorities, women, and the elderly.
Beyond his research contributions, Dr. Peterson has significantly influenced academic medicine through his editorial leadership as a longstanding Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association and service on the editorial boards of Circulation and Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. An elected member of prestigious organizations including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the Council of University Cardiologists, he has received numerous honors including the American Heart Association's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award and Meritorious Achievement Award. His current work continues to advance the integration of big data analytics with clinical implementation science to transform cardiovascular care delivery across diverse healthcare settings. As a mentor to countless researchers and clinician-scientists, Dr. Peterson remains at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between clinical research evidence and real-world patient outcomes.
