Kidney and Cardiovascular Effectiveness of Empagliflozin Compared With Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 Inhibitors in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes.

My primary research focus lies at the intersection of kidney and cardiovascular disease including pulmonary hypertension, heart failure, and atherosclerotic disease in patients with chronic kidney disease. 

Dr. Marsolo is a faculty member in the Department of Population Health Sciences (DPHS) and a member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI).  His current research focuses on infrastructure to support the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and other real-world data sources in observational and comparative effectiveness research and public health surveillance, as well as standards and architectures for multi-center learning health systems.  He serves as faculty advisor to the DPHS DataShare Shared Facility and faculty lead for the Pragmatic Health Services Research (PHSR) functional group within the DCRI.  Dr. Marsolo received his PhD in Computer Science from The Ohio State University, with a dissertation on data mining, specifically the modeling and classification of biomedical data. 

Prior to joining DPHS, Dr. Marsolo was an an Associate Professor in the Division of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC). While at CCHMC, Dr. Marsolo served as faculty advisor for BMI Data Services, a shared facility that supported distributed data sharing networks and also developed registry platforms to support learning networks. These included a configurable system for capturing summary or practice-level measures, and a “data-in-once” architecture that allowed information to be collected in the EHR and then be automatically transferred to a registry in order to support chronic care management, quality improvement and research.

Area of Expertise: Informatics, Data Quality, Common Data Models, Data Standards and Data Harmonization

I am an interventional cardiologist with a specific focus on the diagnosis and treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease. As a clinician, I see patients in the office and do coronary and peripheral vascular procedures (angiography and interventions) in the Duke Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory. I have served as the Medical Director of the cath lab at Duke since 2016. Alongside my partners in the cath lab, we collaborate with our cardiothoracic surgeons to hold Heart Team meetings each week, and we frequently are asked to address complex cardiovascular issues as a multidisciplinary team.

I also have a broad background in cardiovascular site-based research, multicenter clinical trials, clinical event classification, and observational analyses. I have helped to lead clinical trial efforts at the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) by designing and conducting studies evaluating new and existing treatments for patients with coronary artery disease and peripheral artery disease. My specific research interests include examining access to care and disparities in care for patients with peripheral artery disease and the design and conduct of pragmatic clinical trials in cardiovascular disease.

Neha J. Pagidipati, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and cardiovascular disease prevention specialist.  Since 2011, she has conducted research on cardiometabolic disease prevention, lifestyle modification and weight management.  She is currently an NIH K12 scholar in Implementation and Dissemination Science. 

Dr. Pagidipati is building the Duke Cardiometabolic Disease Prevention Program, which focuses on behavior change and risk factor management in patients with high risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.  The program’s multi-disciplinary team of cardiologists, endocrinologists, nephrologists, and hepatologists will work together to provide coordinated, team-based care to the most high-risk and complex patients in the health system. 

Dr. Pagidipati’s research grants include the COORDINATE-Diabetes Trial, to improve the quality of care for patients with diabetes and cardiovascular disease across the U.S., and QuBBD:  Deep Poisson Methods for Biomedical Time-to-Event and Longitudinal Data.  She served as a study clinician on the large, longitudinal EXSCEL (Exenatide Study of Cardiovascular Event Lowering) trial.  She is currently conducting a nation-wide study of obesity management using real-world data sources, and is a site investigator for the Baseline Health Study in collaboration with Verily Life Sciences. In addition, she is leading a large study within the Duke Health System to study heterogeneity within cardiovascular disease risk and response to weight loss interventions among individuals with obesity. 

Dr. Pagidipati graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.  She completed her internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  During a two-year research fellowship in Global Women’s Health at the Brigham, she obtained an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and studied cardiovascular disease prevention in women in India.  Dr. Pagidipati completed a four-year cardiology fellowship at the Duke University School of Medicine and served as Chief Research Fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute.  In 2017, she became a faculty member of the Duke University School of Medicine School.