Elliot Chaikof Biography
About Dr. Chaikof
Elliot L. Chaikof, MD, PhD, is Chair of the Department of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), as well as the Johnson and Johnson Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He currently serves as Chair of the Surgical Executive Committee at Harvard Medical School.
He is also a member of the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering of Harvard University, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and a member of the faculty in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also serves on the MD-PhD Executive Leadership Committee of Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Chaikof received his BA and MD from Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his training in General Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in Vascular Surgery at Emory University.
He joined BIDMC and Harvard Medical School in 2010 from Emory University, where he was Chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery, Program Director of the Residency in Vascular Surgery, and the John E. Skandalakis Professor of Surgery. He also served as an adjunct professor in the School of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, serving as the primary thesis advisor for over 15 PhD and MD-PhD students.
Dr. Chaikof's clinical interests focus on the treatment of patients with vascular diseases of the aorta, carotid, and peripheral arteries. In 1994, he initiated one of the first programs for endovascular aortic aneurysm repair in the United States and was among the core group of principal investigators who conducted the first FDA-approved clinical trials of stent-grafts for repair of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms. He has been responsible for the formulation of reporting standards for clinical trials in endovascular aneurysm repair, as well as national clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of patients with aortic aneurysms.
He has edited one of the leading textbooks in the field of vascular surgery, the Atlas of Vascular Surgery and Endovascular Therapy, published by Elsevier with editions in Portuguese and Mandarin.
Dr. Chaikof's basic research interests lie at the interface of medicine and engineering. He served as the Emory Principle Investigator for a $40 million dollar, 10-year award from the National Science Foundation that funded the Georga Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues. Leading collaborative research efforts with clinicians, engineers, and biologists, Dr. Chaikof has designed new strategies that have advanced the development of engineered living tissues, implantable devices, and artificial organs, as well as cell-based therapies, which have helped to define the evolving field of Regenerative Medicine. More recently, his work has focused on drug discovery, in collaboration with medicinal and computational chemists, to develop more effective treatments for atherosclerosis, venous thrombosis, metabolic syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. Chaikof's laboratory has received more than $30 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as support from the American Heart Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. His discoveries have been licensed to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries and have led to the founding of new companies focused on drug discovery. He has received the Clemson Award for Applied Research from the Society for Biomaterials and has served as President of the International Society of Applied Cardiovascular Biology.
Dr. Chaikof has published more than 300 articles in major surgical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature as well as in leading journals in the fields of engineering and chemistry. Dr. Chaikof's leadership of clinical units and large projects that span and bring together schools of medicine and engineering and constituency organizations has contributed to public policy designed to improve the quality of care of the surgical patient. Dr. Chaikof is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (Institute of Medicine) and serves as Vice Chair for Section 1 (Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering) of the National Academy.