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Dr. Christopher J. O'Donnell received his undergraduate degree from Brown University, his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and his public health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed an internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is currently on staff as a practicing cardiologist in the cardiology division, department of medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and he is a faculty member (associate clinical professor) of Harvard Medical School.

In 1996, Dr. O'Donnell joined the Framingham Heart Study as a Medical Officer of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. In 2002, he was appointed associate director of the Framingham Heart Study and co-chair of its genetic steering committee. In 2006, he was named senior advisor to the director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute for Genome Research. In this role, he helps steer the direction of the genetic and genomic research portfolio of NHLBI. In 2006, he was named the scientific director of the Framingham SHARE (SNP Health Association Resource) Study, a whole-genome association study now underway in over 9,000 Framingham Heart Study participants. In 2007, he became a tenured investigator of the division of intramural research of NHLBI. His major research focus is on the epidemiology and genetic epidemiology of clinical and subclinical cardiovascular disease, and he directs numerous large-scale imaging studies using cardiac CT scanning, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, and other subclinical atherosclerosis modalities. He has published over 160 peer reviewed articles and chapters, in journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Medical Genetics, Circulation, and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. O'Donnell is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. He serves in a leadership position on the Council for Epidemiology and Prevention of the American Heart Association as well as on numerous Committees and Working Groups of the NHLBI and NIH. In 2000, Dr. O'Donnell was a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Award of Merit for his research achievements at the Framingham Heart Study. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and he also recently served as an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.