5 Questions with Susan Cheng, MD
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For this issue, Cardiology Today spoke with Editorial Board Member Susan Cheng, MD, MPH, MMSc. She is associate professor of medicine and the Erika J. Glazer Chair in Cardiovascular Women’s Health and Population Science, program director of the Center for Research in Women’s Health and Sex Differences, director of cardiovascular population sciences and director of public health research at Smidt Heart Institute, Cedars-Sinai.
Cheng received her medical degree in 2003 from Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She completed her internship and residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2006, her clinical fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2009 and a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Framingham Heart Study in 2011. Cheng received a Master of Medical Science degree in clinical and translation investigation at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and a Master of Public Health degree in clinical effectiveness at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2012.
Cheng is actively involved with the American Heart Association. She serves as a member of its Scientific Sessions Planning Committee, vice chair of the Scientific & Clinical Education Lifelong Learning Committee of its Council on Genomic and Precision Medicine, a member of its Genomic and Precision Medicine Steering Committee, a writing group member of its Epidemiology and Statistics Committee and a faculty mentor of its Research Leaders Academy. An echocardiographer, her research interests include drivers of CV aging in women and men, CV care of older adults and sex differences in CV outcomes.
Cardiology Today: Who has had the greatest influence on your career?
Cheng: I have had the very good fortune to have been mentored by many people, and I consider all my colleagues to be ongoing peer-mentors. During my early career, the people who were especially formative were Peter Libby, MD, Scott D. Solomon, MD, Thomas Wang, MD, and Vasan S. Ramachandran, MD. I continue to learn from each of these exceptional mentors lessons about leadership, adaptability, communication, patience, the scientific method and staying grounded in the key clinical questions. I still exchange articles and books with my mentors, and they are enormously helpful. For instance, Dr. Ramachandran recently reminded me of the famous quote, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” I take this one to heart and have always enjoyed being a part of teams that include people smarter than me.
Cardiology Today: What has been the greatest challenge in your professional career thus far?
Cheng: One of the greatest challenges has been to build teams of people that cross multiple generations. I am admittedly a classic Gen X-er in many respects, and so I have ended up right in the middle of some major generational workstyle differences when it has come to building research programs. As in many work environments, there are often differences in perspectives and ways of communicating when it comes to traditionalists and baby boomers on the one hand and millennials and Gen Z on the other hand. It has been hard work, but we have been able to forge bridges across generations. Ironically, much of this has been helped by the pandemic, as we have a number of COVID-19 research projects that have strongly motivated people from different backgrounds to take a truly team science approach to addressing the public health mission.
Cardiology Today: What area of research in cardiology interests you most right now?
Cheng: I have always been interested in healthy CV aging and identifying the factors that either promote healthy aging or stand in the way. Directly extending from this interest are two areas of work that we are especially focused on right now. The first area has to do with sex differences that have stood out from our study data, pointing to intrinsic differences in female vs. male CV physiology that likely set the stage for important sex differences in CV pathophysiology and disease. The second area has to do with COVID-19 and how the pandemic is altering aging trajectories for all people — whether or not they have been able to avoid infection; have been infected and are recovered; or are still recovering.
We are now all witnessing medical history in the making with global and local responses to the pandemic. From telehealth to vaccines, the ways by which biomedicine has rapidly adapted to confront and tackle the major challenges posed by COVID-19 are remarkable. I will say that locally, here at Cedars-Sinai, what I have seen of how clinicians and researchers have gone above and beyond to do everything possible to care for affected patients and push the science forward has been truly inspirational. I have never before seen people of all levels and types of training and experience come together and work so efficiently and effectively toward a singular mission. It is a testament to what we in health care and research can accomplish in the moment.
Cardiology Today: What advice would you offer to a student in medical school?
Cheng: I mentor a number of pre-medical and medical students, and I encourage every single one to try to learn at least a little bit about data management and analysis and, ideally, how to code in R. Everything we do is becoming increasingly data-driven, and exponentially so. I am a big believer in every physician being empowered enough to understand how medical data are generated, where the data come from, where they go, how they can be analyzed, and how they can be interpreted to inform important clinical decisions. And where things can go wrong in this process. This is especially important for physicians interested in research. Here is where I get to refer to a brilliant quote by Ben Gerber, MD, MPH, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, who wrote in a key editorial, “Physician scientists need to learn how to code — and we are not referring to the International Classification of Diseases.”
Cardiology Today: What are your hobbies outside of practicing medicine?
Cheng: Outside of practicing medicine, one of my favorite hobbies is website design. This is a hobby that I’ve had since college. This reminds me of when I was being interviewed for cardiology fellowship by Stephen D. Wiviott, MD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and one of his questions to me was also about hobbies. I blurted out “website design” and then immediately thought this might have been a bit too nerdy, and so I followed up quickly with “I mean team sports.” Despite the awkwardness of the moment, I was lucky enough to get into that fellowship program.
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