Dr. Elaine M. Urbina is a Professor of Pediatric Cardiology and the Director of Preventive Cardiology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where she also serves as Research Integrity Officer. 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 disease risk factors.

Dr. Urbina’s clinical activities focus on prevention (obesity, hypertension and dyslipidemias) while her research focuses on new non-invasive methods of assessing atherosclerotic CV target organ damage in youth related to CV risk factors especially those that cluster with obesity.

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 (i3C) 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 (SFRN), an AHA-funded grant that explored population, clinical and epigenetic determinants of cardiac and vascular target organ damage in youth. Dr. Urbina has published well over 220 peerreviewed articles, book chapters and reviews. She has an h-index of 57 and her published work has been cited >24,400 times. Her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association (AHA) since 1994.

Dr. Urbina received her M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia, completed her residency in pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, and a fellowship in pediatric cardiology at Tulane University. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (FAAP), the American College of Cardiology (FACC), and the American Heart Association (FAHA) and past chair of the Atherosclerosis, Hypertension and Obesity in Youth Committee of the CV Disease in the Young Council of AHA. She is also the Past-President of the North American Artery Society.