One of only 25 scientists to receive the AHA's prestigious award, which consists of a five-year $500,000 grant, Aird specializes in investigating endothelial cell heterogeneity, widely believed to play a critical role in both homeostasis and vascular disease states. Aird's laboratory will use the award in their continued investigations of the mechanisms that underlie differential gene expression within the endothelium and to gain a better understanding of how the endothelial cells lining the body's blood vessels are differentially regulated in space and time.
"Bill Aird's work has greatly advanced our thinking about the critical role of the endothelium to health and disease states," notes Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, BIDMC's Chief Academic Officer. "This well-deserved honor from the AHA further serves to demonstrate the fundamental importance of this area of research within the field of medicine."
A graduate of The University of Western Ontario Medical School, Aird completed residencies at St. Michael's Hospital and Toronto General Hospital, teaching hospitals of the University of Toronto. Before joining BIDMC in 1996, he held both clinical and research fellowships in medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and ranks third in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes Center and is a research partner of Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox. For more information, visit www.bidmc.harvard.edu.