President's Message
April/May 2025

Hello PaACC Colleagues:

My name is Marietta Ambrose, MD, MPH, MSED, FACC, and I am honored to be serving you and PaACC as the organization’s new president for the next 18 months. I am the new Eastern PA governor, and I am excited to be working closely with the new vice president and Western PA governor, Timothy (Tim) Wong, MD, MS, FAHA, FACC, and our chapter executive, Jennifer Ray Beckman, MBA, CAE, to lead our chapter. Please allow me to quickly reintroduce myself and Tim. I am an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with interests in multimodality imaging, women’s health and cardio obstetrics, medical education, and global cardiovascular health. Tim is an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center with interests in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and cardiovascular imaging, serving as the director of the UPMC Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center and the associate director of the UPMC Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Center.

We thank our immediate predecessors Doctors Ross Peterson and Srinath (Sri) Adusumalli) for their incredible leadership of the chapter and its activities over the last three years. Despite the tremendous challenges of the past years, they have accomplished a great amount on behalf of our patients and members, on a wide variety of important issues, from impactful advocacy work resulting in meaningful practice change, to implementing novel, accessible educational programming for our members, to leading several initiatives focused on promoting health equity, diversity and inclusion in cardiology. We are grateful they will continue to contribute to the activities of the chapter as members of our PaACC council.

I want to thank all our members, for having the confidence in us to continue the work of our former chapter presidents. We are most interested in closely representing your interests, especially given the incredibly challenging times which we live in.

Going forward, through this newsletter, we will continue to highlight fantastic PaACC and ACC activities/initiatives that might be of interest to you.

ACC.25 Chicago

It was fantastic to meet so many of you at ACC.25. I want to thank all who attended our Pennsylvania ACC mixer and networking event in Chicago, a couple of weeks ago at Bar 22. It was so encouraging to meet the future of cardiology in our early career members, Fellows in Training, medical residents, and medical students. Connecting in person with our CV team members and our fellows (FACCs) also reminded us that there is nothing like our cardiovascular community! That during these challenging times, we must continue to stand together as a community and stay true to our and ACC’s shared mission to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health for all.

I witnessed numerous PA members participating in the different educational activities and sessions and contributing to the success of ACC.25/WCC scientific sessions. I want to highlight the personal achievement of Katie Berlacher MD, MS, FACC (PaACC past governor and president) on chairing a fantastic and successful meeting! In Katie’s own words “As chair of the Annual Scientific Session and a proud lifelong learner, I wanted to find ways to inject joy, interaction and energy into the meeting, and I think we have succeeded.”  I wholeheartedly agree that she achieved her goal! A special recognition also goes to the PaACC Fellow-in-Training Jeopardy Team from Lehigh Valley Health Network FITs which represented us at ACC.25 FIT Jeopardy! Team members Doctors Talal Al-Mohamad, David Egeler and Pranav Mahajan, deserve our gratitude and congratulations!

      

Local Notable PaACC Activities

Partnership with the Italian Federation of Cardiology

You may remember that PaACC and the Italian Federation of Cardiology (comprised of the Italian Society of Hospital Cardiologists https://www.anmco.it and the Italian Society of Cardiology /Associazione Nazionale Medici Cardiologi Ospedalieri - ANMCO https://www.sicardiologia.it) are a part of ACC’s International Outreach program, commonly called "twinning." Under this program, cardiovascular societies from around the world engage in multiple shared activities and outreach to collaborate, grow and learn from each other in a more meaningful manner. We continue this tradition established years ago by members including Doctors Paul Casale, Victor Ferrari and the late Alfred Bove.

CVTeam Educational Series

The MACCS CVTeam has their next virtual educational forum scheduled for April 26th from 8-10 am. This event will also cover the top late breaking clinical trials that were presented in Chicago at ACC.25, with a focus on our CV Team members. Free to participate and claim CEU credits, just access the link here.

Pennsylvania ACC Multimodality Imaging Series

I hope you have joined the new multimodality imaging series which was started by Dr. Mahesh Vidula (Early Career Representative, Eastern) and Dr. Neerav Sheth (Advocacy section lead). Our first two sessions highlighted (in my humble opinion) top quality, publication worthy, presentations that illustrated the importance of multimodality imaging in the diagnosis of  Burkholderia cepacia Endocarditis in a Patient With Severe Mitral Annular Calcification, and Cardiac Oxalosis Cardiomyopathy in a patient with End Stage Renal Disease  respectively. To say that we are in awe of the talented community of cardiovascular experts in our state, is an understatement! So watch your email for information on registration for our next session in September!

I am looking forward to serving and working with all of you over the next 18 months. Check out our website at www.pcacc.org, follow us on X @PAChapterACC, and please reach out any time via president@pcacc.orgwith questions, ideas, needs or if you would like to get involved in PaACC activities.

Marietta Ambrose, MD, MPH, MSEd, FACC

President, PaACC

Governor, Eastern PA