Todd Rosengart, MD

Dr. Todd K. Rosengart is Professor and Chairman of the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). He also holds the DeBakey-Bard Chair of Surgery, and is an associate of the Professional Staff at the Texas Heart Institute. Show full bio

Dr. Rosengart is Board Chairman of the Affiliated Medical Services, a 1000-provider medical services consortium of BCM and University of Texas faculty for the HarrisHealth county medical system, vice-chair of the BCM Faculty Group Practice, overseeing its 350-provider BCM private clinical faculty group, and he serves on the Joint Venture Board of Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center.

He also recently served as National Chairman of the CHI Cardiothoracic Surgery Clinical Standards Committee, with oversight of cardiovascular surgery activities for 20 institutions performing cardiac surgery as members of CHI, a national not-for-profit organization with 120 member hospitals.

Before arriving in Houston, Dr. Rosengart was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery and Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at SUNY-Stony Brook, and Co-Director of the Stony Brook University Heart Center. He was previously the inaugural Owen L. Coon Chair of Surgery at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and Professor of Surgery at Northwestern University. Prior to that, Dr. Rosengart was Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Weill Cornell Medical College and Associate Attending Cardiothoracic Surgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He received his MD degree from the Northwestern University Medical Education Honors Program.  He completed his general surgical training at New York University and his cardiothoracic surgery fellowship at The New York Hospital. He was also Medical Staff Fellow in the Surgery Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Dr. Rosengart’s primary research interest is in the field of gene transfer and new blood vessel development (angiogenesis) as well as cellular reprogramming. In 1997, he and his team at Cornell performed the world’s first viral-based cardiac gene transfer procedure, part of a landmark NIH and FDA-approved first-in-man Phase I trial. Dr. Rosengart continues to run an NIH-funded laboratory, with uninterrupted funding for over 20 years, and is a recipient of nearly $15 million in research and other grants. He holds twelve U.S. patents and is author of 200 peer-reviewed articles and other publications with over 9600 citations, scored at an h-index of 52 (Google Scholar).

In addition to his institutional and research duties, Dr. Rosengart is currently chair of the NIH Bioengineering, Technology and Surgical Sciences Study Section, chair of the American Heart AssociationSurgery Basic Science Study Section, and Editor of Seminars in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. He is Vice President(president-elect) of the Society of Surgical Chairs, Councilor for the Southern Thoracic Surgical Society, and a member of the American Surgical Association. He is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Cardiology, and is a member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the Southern Surgical Association, and the Texas Surgical Society. He has also held membership in the New York Surgical Society and the New York Society for Thoracic Surgery.

A serial entrepreneur, Dr. Rosengart is co-founder of Vitals.com (MDx, LLC), one of the world’s largest physician search and medical consumerism websites, with over 15 million monthly unique visits,and he is co-founder of XyloCor Therapeutics, a gene therapy startup holding FDA approval with “Fast Track” designation for Phase I/II testing of a novel cardiac gene therapy prototype for treating patients with end stage coronary artery disease.

See Publications

Texas Heart Institute Positions

  • Editorial Board, Texas Heart Institute Journal

Interests

  • Minimally Invasive Valve Surgery
  • Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery
  • Cardiothoracic Surgery
  • Gene transfer and new blood vessel development (angiogenesis)
  • Coronary artery disease

Education

  • Medical School:

    Northwestern University

  • Internship:

    New York University Medical Center

  • Residency:

    New York University Medical Center

  • Fellowships:

    The New York Hospital ( Cardiovascular Surgery Fellowship)
    National Institutes of Health (Surgery Branch)

Honors, Awards and Memberships

Publications

Brlecic, P. E., Whitlock, R. S., Zhang, Q. et al. (2023). Dispersion of National Institute of Health funding to departments of surgery is contracting. J Surg Res 289, 8–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.03.023.
Sylvester, C. B., Ryan, C. T., Frankel, W. C. et al. (2023). Readmissions after surgical aortic valve replacement: influence of prosthesis type. J Surg Res 287, 124–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.01.007.
Brlecic, P. E., Bonham, C. A., Rosengart, T. K. et al. (2023). Direct cardiac reprogramming: A new technology for cardiac repair. J Mol Cell Cardiol 178, 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjmcc.2023.03.008.
Frankel, W. C., Sylvester, C. B., Asokan, S. et al. (2023). Coronary artery bypass grafting at safety-net versus non–safety-net hospitals. JTCVS Open, S2666273623000177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xjon.2023.01.008.
Martinez-Vargas, M., Cebula, A., Brubaker, L. S. et al. (2023). A novel interaction between extracellular vimentin and fibrinogen in fibrin formation. Thromb Res 221, 97–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.thromres.2022.11.028.
Nowrouzi, R., Sylvester, C. B., Treffalls, J. A. et al. (2022). Chronic kidney disease, risk of readmission, and progression to end-stage renal disease in 519,387 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting. JTCVS Open 12, 147–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xjon.2022.08.013.
Williams, A. M., Shah, N. P., Rosengart, T. et al. (2022). Emerging role of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging in cardiac surgery. J Card Surg. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocs.16992.
Ryan, C. T., Zeng, Z., Chatterjee, S. et al. (2022). Machine learning for dynamic and early prediction of acute kidney injury after cardiac surgery. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg, S0022-5223(22)01030–3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtcvs.2022.09.045.
Brlecic, P. E. and Rosengart, T. K. (2022). Commentary: Myocardial relaxation matters. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg, S0022-5223(22)00949–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtcvs.2022.09.008.
Brlecic, P. E. and Rosengart, T. K. (2022). Commentary: What’s on the inside counts. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg, S0022-5223(22)00806–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtcvs.2022.07.018.