Leadership

Joseph Wu, MD, PhD

Director

Joseph C. Wu, MD, PhD, is Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and the Simon H. Stertzer, MD, Professor of Medicine and Radiology. Dr. Wu received his medical degree from Yale. He completed his medicine internship, residency, and cardiology fellowship (STAR program) at UCLA. He obtained his PhD in the Department of Molecular & Medical Pharmacology with the late Dr. Sam Sanjiv Gambhir. His clinical interests include adult congenital heart disease and cardiovascular imaging.

His lab works on biological mechanisms of patient-specific and disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The main goals are to (i) understand cardiovascular disease mechanisms, (ii) accelerate drug discovery, (iii) develop "clinical trial in a dish" concept, and (iv) implement precision medicine for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular patients. His lab uses a combination of genomics, stem cells, cellular & molecular biology, physiological testing, and molecular imaging technologies to better understand molecular and pathological processes. Dr. Wu has published >600 manuscripts with H-index of 129 on Google scholar and recognition as top 0.1% of highly cited researchers in Web of Science for past 5 years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023). Among his trainees, 52 of them are principal investigators in the US or abroad.

Dr. Wu has received numerous awards, including National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award, NIH Roadmap Transformative Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) given out by President Obama at the White House, American Heart Association (AHA) Innovative Research Award, AHA Established Investigator Award, AHA Merit Award, AHA Distinguished Scientist Award, and Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Innovation in Regulatory Science Award. 

Dr. Wu serves on the FDA Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee and board of Keystone Symposia. He is co-founder of Greenstone Biosciences, a startup that uses clinical genomics, iPSCs, and AI/ML to accelerate drug discovery.

Dr. Wu is an elected member of American Society of Clinical Investigators (ASCI), Association of University Cardiologists (AUC), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), American Association of Physicians (AAP), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Academia Sinica (Taiwan)National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and National Academy of Medicine (NAM). Dr. Wu is also President of the American Heart Association.