Carl W. Tong, MD, PhD

Dr. Carl Tong took an unusual path to pursue his passion for caring for heart failure patients as a physician-scientist. The U.S. Air Force provided education in bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. Experiences in the First Gulf War and a short-term summer mission to Honduras caused him to change his career. The GI Bill and the Texas Hazelwood Act supported the completion of combined MD-PhD degrees for him. Seeing a heart failure patient suffer caused Dr. Tong to pursue cardiology and cardiovascular research. His extended cardiology fellowship at Wisconsin included cardiovascular disease, NIH-T32 research, and advanced heart failure/transplant cardiology.

As a physician and medical director, he helped to rescue a new heart transplant program and start a new left ventricular assist device program in Texas. As an associate professor and course director in Texas, he implemented active teaching encompassing hands-on/ears-on learning with robotic simulators, computer simulation of the cardiovascular system, and hands-on introduction to bedside echocardiogram. As a scientist, he elucidated fundamental mechanisms that govern heart function (cross-bridge cooperative activation/de-activation modulates heart function independent of calcium) and developed new methods (using surface plasmon resonance to measure cross-bridge attachment/detachment within intact sarcomeres, simultaneous measurements of intracardiac pressure and intracellular calcium on intact beating mouse hearts, a breath analyzer that measures cardiac output).

Dr. Tong continues a passionate pursuit of finding better ways to treat heart failure patients as a physician-scientist, including left ventricular assist device heart recovery, non-invasive monitoring devices, and the development of new myofilament-based approaches.