Sandip Mukherjee, MD, is a cardiologist at Yale Medicine who specializes in treating and preventing conditions such as hypertension and aortic aneurysms.
Dr. Mukherjee’s interest in medicine stems from watching his grandfather practice as a surgeon in a rural part of India. “There was very little money, but what he did showed itself in the thankfulness of the patients that he treated,” he says. “There’s no better feeling than saving someone’s life.”
Dr. Mukherjee went to Texas Tech University for medical school, and then completed his residency and fellowship at Yale. As the first cardiac ultrasound imaging fellow, he specializes in preventing heart disease.
As a physician, Dr. Mukherjee focuses on preventing and treating heart disease. “If everyone followed all the preventive strategies properly, we have a chance of reducing 70% of all cardiac events in the world,” he says. His main focus is on identifying risk factors of coronary artery disease, one of the most common causes of heart attack.
In the event of a heart attack or other serious cardiac event, Dr. Mukherjee and his team use the latest technology to operate quickly. “If you come in within an hour or so after a heart attack, we have the ability to open up an artery, put in a stent, and save a life,” he says.
In addition to seeing patients, Dr. Mukherjee conducts clinical research to investigate safer and more effective ways of treating heart diseases. “I think that the advances that we make, either in the lab or in clinical-translational research, have a profound influence on the way that patients are treated,” he says. Throughout his career as a researcher, he has witnessed a transformation in heart disease drugs and procedures that have made it easier and faster to rescue patients from life-threatening cardiac events. “We’re living in a golden age of medicine,” he says.
Dr. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine.
