Distinguished Scientists for 2026
The American Heart Association selects six Distinguished Scientists for 2026.
The 2026 awardees will be honored Saturday, Nov. 7, during Scientific Sessions 2026 Opening Session.
Zoltan P. Arany, MD, PhD, FAHA
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Zoltan Arany is the Samuel Bellet Professor and chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Arany earned his BA and MD-PhD degrees from Harvard College and Medical School. He completed an internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, a cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, all in Boston. He joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2014.
His lab focuses on the mechanisms that underlie metabolic pathophysiology in the cardiovascular system, using approaches ranging from omics to model organisms and human clinical studies. Arany is a recipient of several awards including the American Heart Association Established Investigator Award, the Hal Dvorak Young Investigator Award in Translational Research, the Inaugural Yale Calabresi Prize, the Stanley M.
Cohen Award for Biomedical Research, the Research Achievement Award of the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR) and the American Heart Association’s Distinguished Scientist Award. He is elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigators (ASCI), to the American Association of Physicians (AAP), where he is currently Secretary of the Council, and to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). Arany has published more than 200 research papers in prominent journals such as New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Cell, Science, Circulation, PNAS, Cell Metabolism Nature Metabolism. Arany is also an active clinical cardiologist, teacher and mentor.
Benoit G. Bruneau, PhD, FAHA
Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease
University of California San Francisco
San Fransisco, California
Benoit G. Bruneau is director and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the William H. Younger, Jr., endowed chair in cardiovascular disease, and was the recipient of the Lawrence J. and Florence A. DeGeorge Charitable Trust/American Heart Association Established Investigator Award. Before joining Gladstone, Bruneau was a scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto. He earned his doctorate in physiology at the University of Ottawa and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Jonathan and Christine Seidman.
Bruneau’s research aims to understand the mechanisms by which gene programs are deployed during cardiac differentiation. He is interested in how all levels of gene regulation coordinate this process, and how it is integrated during the formation of the heart. Ultimately, through his lab’s efforts, he would like to uncover how these processes are dysregulated in congenital heart disease, and how they could be harnessed to regenerate diseased hearts.
Joseph A. Hill, MD, PhD, FAHA
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Dallas, Texas
Joseph A. Hill is a cardiologist-scientist whose research focuses on molecular mechanisms of remodeling in the disease-stressed myocardium. He earned an MD and PhD from Duke University. He then pursued postdoctoral scientific training at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, followed by clinical training in internal medicine and cardiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Hill served on the faculty of the University of Iowa for five years before moving in 2002 to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to assume the role of chief of cardiology and director of the Harry S. Moss Heart Center.
Hill’s research group strives to decipher mechanisms of structural, functional, metabolic and electrical remodeling in heart disease with an eye toward therapeutic intervention. Hill serves on numerous committees, boards and study sections, and he lectures widely. In addition, he serves on several editorial boards, including Circulation Research (senior consulting editor), American Journal of Physiology, Heart and Circulatory Physiology, and American Journal of Cardiology. He is editor-in-chief of the textbook Muscle: Fundamental Biology and Mechanisms of Disease. He has received numerous recognitions and awards, including election to the Association of American Professors; he recently served as president of the Association of University Cardiologists and chair of the Academic Council of the American College of Cardiology. He received the 2018 Research Achievement Award from the International Society for Heart Research, the 2020 Lucian Award from McGill University, delivered the William Harvey Lecture this year at the European Society of Cardiology and received the 2023 Medal of Merit from the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences. Presently, he serves as editor-in-chief of Circulation, the highest-ranking cardiovascular journal. Hill maintains an active clinical practice focusing on general cardiology, heart failure and hypertension.
Richard N. Kitsis, MD, FAHA
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, New York
Richard N. Kitsis is known for research into fundamental mechanisms of cell death and the roles of cell death in heart disease. He has elucidated basic mechanisms of apoptosis and regulated forms of necrosis, molecular connections among these programs, connections with aspects of mitochondrial signaling and interrelationships between cell death and senescence. He established that regulated forms of cell death account for most cardiomyocyte loss during reperfused myocardial infarction and play causal roles in heart failure. He has contributed to the development and preclinical testing of novel small-molecule inhibitors of cell death that attenuate doxorubicin-induced cardiomyopathy without limiting the efficacy of doxorubicin to kill cancer cells. Current efforts focus on identifying nodal points that can be therapeutically targeted to reduce infarct size during myocardial infarction.
Kitsis received his AB in chemistry from Harvard College and MD from the University of California, San Francisco. He completed internal medicine training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center and cardiology and postdoctoral research fellowships at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center. He previously served as chief of cardiology at Montefiore/Einstein and now directs the Cardiovascular Research Institute. He has been a research mentor to 15 PhD students and more than 60 postdoctoral and clinical fellows and directed an NIH T32 Cardiovascular Training grant for 15 years. He has served as chair of the NIH Myocardial Ischemia and Metabolism Study Section, as a member of multiple NIH and American Heart Association advisory committees, chair of the BCVS Council, organizer of BCVS and Keystone scientific meetings and associate editor of Cell Death and Differentiation and Circulation Heart Failure. He has been elected to membership in ASCI and AAP and fellowship in AAAS, and honored with the ISHR President’s Distinguished Award, Korey Prize for Translational Science and Medicine and Schottenstein Prize in Cardiovascular Science.
Michael A. Moskowitz, MD, FAHA
Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts
Michael A Moskowitz is a Harvard physician-scientist whose career has fundamentally reshaped modern understanding of migraine and significantly impacted cerebral ischemia. He completed undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins and earned his medical degree from Tufts before house staff training at Yale and, afterward, the Brigham-Childrens Neurology Program, followed by postdoctoral training and a faculty position at MIT-Harvard. He joined MGH in the mid 1980s, where he built the Stroke and Neurovascular Regulation Laboratory and rose to professor of neurology.
Among his most influential discoveries, Moskowitz identified and mapped the sensory innervation of the circle of Willis via trigeminal afferents, establishing the trigeminovascular system as a central substrate for migraine pain. His group showed that trigeminal fibers release neuropeptides — most notably CGRP — that drive meningeal vasodilation, neurogenic inflammation and headache, overturning a century‑old dogma that migraine was purely a vascular dilation disorder. He unexpectedly identified that ergots and triptans block neuropeptide release via neuronal prejunctional 5-HT receptors, demonstrating that these drugs abort attacks primarily by blocking neuropeptide release rather than simply constricting vessels, work that led directly to numerous clinically used non-constricting CGRP‑targeted therapies in a disorder that affects 1 billion people worldwide. In parallel, his laboratory elucidated cortical spreading depression as a provocative mechanistic bridge between depolarized brain, peptide release and headache, the first identified provocateur of migraine headache.
His group also defined key inflammatory pathways in ischemic brain injury, clarifying roles for nitric oxide synthase subtypes, MMPs, caspases and death receptors while pioneering the use of genetically engineered mice in disease models. As one of the most influential research translationalists of his generation, his reputation is reflected by honors including the International Prize for Translational Neuroscience from the Reemtsma Foundation (Max Planck Society), the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Award from NINDS for distinguished scientific achievement and The Brain Prize in 2021 awarded to him by the Crown Prince of Denmark for his seminal neuroscience migraine research.
Within the international cerebrovascular and headache communities, he is viewed as opening the molecular era of migraine translational research and reframing stroke as a complex neurovascular–inflammatory disorder.
Katherine R. Tuttle, MD
Providence Inland Northwest Health
University of Washington School of Medicine
Spokane, Washington
Katherine R. Tuttle is executive director for research at Providence Inland Northwest Health and professor of medicine at the University of Washington. Tuttle earned her medical degree and completed her internal medicine residency at Northwestern University. She was a fellow in metabolism and endocrinology at Washington University, and completed Nephrology fellowship training at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio.
Tuttle’s major research interests are in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome. As a clinical and translational scientist, her seminal work in mechanistic and preclinical studies laid a foundation for advancing CKM therapies. Over more than three decades, she led studies that delivered SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists as novel agents to reduce risks of kidney failure, major adverse cardiovascular events and premature mortality. She has also been a lead investigator for other CKM therapies, including next-generation incretin, anti-inflammatory and aldosterone agents. Additionally, she leads the CURE-CKD Registry with more than 7 million health system patients.
Tuttle served on the inaugural board of directors for the Kidney Health Initiative and chaired the Diabetic Kidney Disease Collaborative, both for the American Society of Nephrology. She has also chaired many initiatives for the National Institutes of Health, the International Society of Nephrology, Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes, the National Kidney Foundation and the American Diabetes Association. Tuttle has received many honors and awards, including the John P. Peters Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Nephrology, the Medal of Excellence from the American Association of Kidney Patients, the Garabed Eknoyan Award from the National Kidney Foundation, the YWCA Woman of Achievement Award in Science and two University of Washington School of Medicine Outstanding Clinical Faculty Awards. She is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians.
