Zainab Samad
Associate Professor of Medicine

Dr. Zainab Samad is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University and a cardiologist in the Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. She serves as assistant director of research at the Duke Echocardiography Laboratory and director of site-based-research in cardiovascular imaging at Duke Heart Center.

She attended Medical School at the Aga Khan University Medical College in Karachi, Pakistan and thereafter completed her residency training in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Cardiology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Additionally, she completed advanced training in cardiovascular imaging, specifically in clinical echocardiography, cardiac MRI and SPECT-myocardial perfusion imaging. She is also trained in quantitative methods with a Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research degree from the National Institutes of Health- Duke Clinical Research Training Program. 

Since joining faculty at Duke, she has been immersed in growing the trifold mission of the academic program including education, research and clinical service. Her clinical interests include managing patients with heart failure, valvular heart disease and chemotherapy induced cardiotoxcity.
Along with her collaborators, she has developed and harnessed a unique interconnection of multiple large longitudinal imaging databases to address key questions and test hypotheses regarding heart valve disease that have led to international recognition. For example, her investigation of mitral regurgitation and left ventricular systolic dysfunction was selected in the Best of Valve Disease, European Heart Journal 2015. She has had a long-standing interest in the relationship of mental stress and cardiovascular disease. She took a leadership role from an imaging standpoint in the NHLBI funded study, the Reponses of Mental Stress induced Myocardial Ischemia to Escitalopram Treatment (REMIT) study by developing the echocardiography testing, quality control, and reading protocol. Using REMIT data she has made clinically important observations including the higher prevalence of mental stress induced left ventricular dysfunction in women compared with men.  She has published her work in high impact journals including Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, European Heart Journal and the American Heart Journal. Dr. Samad also serves as an associate Editor for the American Heart Journal. 

She has won several awards for her teaching abilities most notably The Thomas Bashore Teaching Award in 2013, The Robert Waugh Teaching Award in 2014 and The Department of Medicine Teaching Award in 2015. She was again nominated for the Thomas Bashore Teaching Award in 2016. She has actively shaped the cardiology-teaching curriculum and developed teaching methods that are currently under patent review at Duke University. She has mentored sonographers, visiting medical students, Duke residents and cardiology fellows.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

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