Eugene Blackstone, MD

Eugene Blackstone, MD, is full-time head of Clinical Investigations at the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic, and staff member of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Quantitative Health Sciences and Transplant Center. Dr. Blackstone is board-certified as Diplomate, National Board of Medical Examiners and as a Fellow, American College of Cardiology.

At Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Blackstone heads a multidisciplinary clinical research team focused on ischemic and valvar heart diseases, heart rhythm disturbances, heart failure (including transplantation, ventricular assist devices and alternatives to transplantation), and benign and malignant diseases of the esophagus and lungs. The research team consists of nearly 50 individuals, while approximately 180 projects are ongoing at any given time. Since 1993, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and continuing at Cleveland Clinic, he has led a team of computer scientists in developing a novel semantic approach to data storage and use.

In addition to generating new knowledge from clinical experiences, his specialty interests include novel mathematical models for analysis of time-related and longitudinal clinical outcomes as well as novel algorithmic approaches, quasi-experimental study design, digital signal processing, mathematical process-control models of the circulatory system and semantic knowledge base/database technology.

Dr. Blackstone completed his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago. He received his medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine, where he graduated with honors. Following medical school, he was awarded two concurrent fellowships from the University of Chicago in the Division of Thoracic Surgery in the School of Medicine. His postdoctoral studies continued under a fellowship from the U.S. Public Health Service and a research fellowship in mathematics, computer science and statistics from the Cardiopulmonary Surgical Research Laboratories at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of the Biological Sciences Computation Center.
 
Stemming from his signal processing work on pulmonary hypertension, Dr. Blackstone became one of a group of 100 scientists appointed to establish the field of digital signal processing. Dr. Blackstone completed his medical internship at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham.

For three years, Dr. Blackstone served as a Major in the Medical Corps in the United States Army where he was Chief of the Cardiovascular Medicine Branch in the Aviation Medicine Research Division at Fort Rucker, Ala. He became a consultant to the Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army and to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Space Lab I, Space Lab II, and Orbital Flight Tests.

In 1980, Dr. Blackstone was appointed to an endowed university chair at UAB as Cardiovascular Surgical Research Professor of Surgery. A major culmination of Dr. Blackstone’s activities is the textbook Cardiac Surgery, now in its third edition.

Since 1987, Dr. Blackstone has been Associate Editor of the flagship journal The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. In 2005, he became an editorial consultant for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. He has published more than 500 articles and has received numerous awards, including the 2003 Maria and Sam Miller Professional Excellence Award for Scientific Achievement in Clinical Research and the University of Chicago Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award, Division of Biological Sciences in 1998.

Dr. Blackstone has been a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University Hospital in Umea, Sweden, the University of Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, and the International Heart School in Bergamo, Italy. He has held several academic appointments at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada and faculty at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine.

He holds many memberships, including the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association.

Dr. Blackstone is an organist and a pianist, with a 68-rank, 4-manual pipe organ in his home.