ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021

Marwah Abdalla, MD, MPH, received her A.B from Harvard College, Medical Degree and Masters in Public Health from Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health. She was an Intern, Resident, and Chief Resident in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She completed her training as a cardiology fellow and Chief Fellow at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Dr. Abdalla is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, clinical cardiologist, and faculty member in the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Her research focuses on hypertension diagnosis, treatment, out-of-office blood pressure monitoring, and the characterization of several blood pressure phenotypic measures including awake and sleep blood pressure, and abnormal ambulatory blood pressure phenotypes including white coat hypertension and masked hypertension. She has demonstrated that African Americans in the Jackson Heart Study have a high prevalence of nocturnal hypertension; higher sleep blood pressure levels are associated with target organ damage (including higher left ventricular mass and left ventricular hypertrophy) and that masked nocturnal hypertension is associated with incident hypertension among African Americans. She is Principal Investigator (PI) of an NIH/NHLBI K23 study entitled “Nocturnal Hypertension and Sleep”, PI of an American Heart Association/Robert Wood Johnson Harold Amos Award to study the association of sleep and blood pressure, as well as PI of a R01 NIH/NHLBI entitled “Automated clinic blood pressure assessment and detection of white coat and masked hypertension study in African Americans.” Her overall career goal is to establish an independent program of research in the areas of hypertension and sleep, focusing on identifying novel interventions to decrease the morbidity and mortality associated with nocturnal hypertension.