Marc Pelletier, MD, MSc, is chief of cardiac surgery for Yale Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital, and physician-in-chief of cardiac surgery for the Heart and Vascular Center of Yale New Haven Health System. He leads a large team of surgeons including a variety of heart subspecialists with an increasing focus on minimally invasive approaches, robotic surgery techniques, and the use of artificial intelligence in surgery to improve care and outcomes for patients.
A practicing cardiac surgeon himself, Dr. Pelletier’s areas of specialty include transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedures, minimally invasive valve surgery, aortic valve and aortic root surgery, surgery for heart failure, and minimally invasive coronary bypass surgery.
Teamwork is the key to success for all cardiac surgeries, Dr. Pelletier says. “We do this work well at Yale because we have the right supporting structures, and that means the anesthesiologists, nurses, perfusionists, technicians, and others in the operating room who are specially trained in the different cardiac surgery subspecialties. The cardiac surgeon may lead the team but is also one part of the equation,” he says.
Dr. Pelletier joined Yale Medicine from University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, where he served as division chief in cardiac surgery and held the Jay L. Ankeney Professorship in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Case Western Reserve University. Prior to that, he served as surgical director of the TAVR program at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He joined the Brigham group in 2016 after nine years as head of cardiac surgery at the New Brunswick Heart Centre in Canada, which followed a period as assistant professor of cardiac surgery at Stanford University.
In addition to his work as a clinician, Dr. Pelletier is a national leader, serving as program chair of the 2026 annual meeting of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) and serving on multiple workforces for the STS, including the Council on Education and the Workforce on Cardiac and Vascular Surgery.
He is a prolific researcher who has authored over 130 peer-reviewed publications in journals including Circulation and The New England Journal of Medicine. “In the last few years, my research interests have shifted toward clinical outcomes research,” he says. “That can mean using existing databases to get additional insights into such questions as what's the best way to do this operation? Should we be using this medication after surgery or another medication?”
The most important focus in heart surgery—and in medicine—is patients, Dr. Pelletier says. “It's never lost on me that each patient I interact with is trusting me with one of the most important events in their life. In fact, they often will divide their life between ‘before heart surgery’ and ‘after heart surgery,’” he says. “The interaction I have with them before surgery may be brief, but in that moment, I want to make sure that they trust me, that they know I'm going to do the best job that I can, and that our team will do their best job and not leave any stone unturned.”
