Betsy Nabel has served as president of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Health Care (BWHC) since 2010. A cardiologist and distinguished biomedical researcher, Nabel is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 2015 Nabel was appointed chief health and medical advisor to the National Football League.
A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Nabel attended Weill Cornell Medical College and completed her internal medicine and cardiology training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. As director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute from 2005-2009, Nabel leveraged the $3 billion research portfolio to establish pioneering scientific programs in genomics, stem cells, and translational research. At the NHLBI, she established Centers of Excellence in developing countries to combat cardiovascular and lung diseases.
An accomplished physician-scientist, Nabel’s work on the molecular genetics of cardiovascular diseases has produced 17 patents and more than 250 scientific publications. Nabel has been named one of the nation’s top leaders in medicine by Modern Healthcare and Becker’s Hospital Review, and one of Boston’s 50 most powerful people by Boston Magazine. Her honors include the Distinguished Bostonian Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians, the Champion in Health Care award from the Boston Business Journal, the Willem Einthoven Award from Leiden University in the Netherlands, the Amgen-Scientific Achievement Award, two Distinguished Achievement Awards and the Eugene Braunwald Academic Mentorship Award from the American Heart Association, and six honorary doctorates.
Her colleagues have elected her to the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and she is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nabel serves on the boards of Medtronic, Moderna Therapeutics, the Broad Institute, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Partners In Health, Ariadne Labs and the Boys & Girls Club of Boston, and previously served on the editorial boards for the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine as well as editor-in-chief of Scientific American Medicine.