Dr. Shah is an internationally-recognized leader in the field of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). He is currently the Stone Endowed Professor and Director of Research for the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr. Shah began his career as a physician-scientist at Northwestern in 2007, where he started the world’s first dedicated clinical program for HFpEF. At the time, there were no proven effective treatments for HFpEF, and patients were often misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Using automated methods for identifying HFpEF patients and systematic "deep phenotyping" to identify underlying pathophysiologic abnormalities, Dr. Shah began define subtypes of HFpEF that facilitated the development of new therpaies and targeted clinical trials. Since its inception, the Northwestern HFpEF Program has served as a model for similar programs worldwide, leading to improved HFpEF clinical trial enrollment and conduct. This work led to Dr. Shah’s leadership roles (as overall PI or steering committee member) for numerous international, multi-center HFpEF clinical trials, which have identified four classes of drugs that benefit HFpEF patients. Dr. Shah has also been a pioneer in the field of transcatheter therapeutics for HFpEF, leading the development of interatrial shunt devices and splanchnic nerve ablation. 

Dr. Shah uses his extensive clinical experience as to guide the design and conduct of basic/translational studies, human physiological studies, and population-based studies. His large research laboratory has been continuously funded since 2010 by multiple NIH R01 grants covering cardiac mechanics, machine learning, and mechanistic epidemiology. Since 2021, Dr. Shah has also been PI of the Data Translation Center and scientific leader for HeartShare (U54 HL160273), a large-scale, multi-center NHLBI study that seeks to improve the classification of HFpEF and develop targeted therapeutics.