Dr. Calum MacRae, MD, PhD

One Brave Idea Leader
Vice Chair for Scientific Innovation, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School

On October 5, 2016, the American Heart Association, Verily Life Sciences LLC and AstraZeneca announced Dr. Calum MacRae as the leader of our One Brave Idea initiative. He beat out hundreds of other applicants from around the world to receive this landmark award that will provide support over a five-year period for a research project focused on uncovering the causes of heart disease, including previously unrecognized signals marking the transition from wellness to the earliest, yet still largely invisible stages of disease.

Dr. Calum MacRae is a cardiologist, geneticist and developmental biologist who graduated from Edinburgh and London before coming to Boston in 1991. After postdoctoral fellowships in human genetics with Drs. Christine and Jon Seidman and developmental biology with Dr. Mark Fishman, as well as additional clinical training in internal medicine and cardiology, he joined the Division of Cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2001. His research is focused on understanding the genetic contribution to common cardiovascular disease using human studies and complementary high-throughput biology in the zebrafish.

Dr. MacRae is also the Vice Chair for Scientific Innovation, Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His clinical interests include the management of inherited heart disease and cardiac involvement in systemic diseases.

In addition, Dr. MacRae is a leading investigator at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Genomics Center, a principal faculty member at the Cardiovascular Research Center and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and an associated member at the Broad Institute.