Dr. Elaine M. Urbina directs the Department of Preventive Cardiology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She began her research career with the Bogalusa Heart Study (BHS) under the leadership of Dr. Gerald Berenson in 1991, where she supervised noninvasive cardiovascular (CV) imaging studies on younger adults for over a decade. In 2003, she moved to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to begin research in cardiovascular assessment in adolescents with obesity-related CV risk factors. Her research has been continuously funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association (AHA) since 1994.
Dr. Urbina has provided cardiac and vascular training and core services to a variety of multicenter pediatric studies including CKiDs (chronic kidney disease), TODAY2 (type 2 diabetes), SEARCH 3 (type 1 diabetes), Udenefil & FUEL (single ventricle congenital heart disease), and DoIT (dyslipidemia). She also continues her work with BHS as a member of the International Childhood CV Cohorts Consortium that follows seven major international cohorts that have been collecting CV risk factor data from pediatric patients. She recently completed her role as principal investigator in Strategically Focused Network in Hypertension, an AHA-funded grant that explored population, clinical and epigenetic determinants of cardiac and vascular target organ damage in youth.
