Dr. Joanna Chikwe is the Irina and George Schaeffer Distinguished Chair of Cardiac Surgery and chairman of the Department of Cardiac Surgery in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Chikwe graduated from Oxford University, and completed medical internship and residency training in the United Kingdom, followed by an advanced cardiac surgery fellowship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, remaining on the faculty there until September 2019. Chikwe’s clinical practice is focused on minimally invasive mitral valve repair and coronary revascularization. Analyzing large population datasets to address knowledge gaps left by randomized clinical trials, Chikwe has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine and The Journal of the American Medical Association, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and the leading cardiac surgery journals.