Dr. Joshua W. Knowles is an Attending Physician in the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease where he is the Director of the Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH) Clinic. He completed his MD-PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he worked in the lab of Prof. Nobuyo Maeda and Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies studying models of atherosclerosis and lipid metabolism. He did his Internal Medicine residency and Cardiovascular Medicine fellowship training at Stanford University working with Dr. Thomas Quertermous. He is the Chief Medical Advisor of the FH Foundation which is a patient-led organization dedicated to increasing awareness of FH, identifying patients with FH screening their family members and treating FH to prevent deleterious outcomes. He has helped to lead the FH Foundation’s effort so establish a national patient registry for FH (CASCADE FH), apply for an ICD10 code for FH and is now using cutting-edge “big-data” approaches to identify previously undiagnosed FH patients in electronic medical records (FIND FH project). He views FH as a “winnable battle” because once FH is identified it can usually be treated quite effectively. He has published over 60 papers focused on heart disease with research projects currently funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.
