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Willerson Named President-Elect of Texas Heart Institute
He will continue as President of UT Health Science Center at Houston
James T. Willerson, M.D., president of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, assumed a second leadership role at a renowned Texas Medical Center institution Oct. 6 as he was named president–elect of the Texas Heart Institute (THI) at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital.
UT Health Science Center President James T. Willerson, M.D.,
left, will succeed Denton Cooley, M.D., as president of Texas
Heart Institute in addition to his UT duties.
The THI Board of Trustees announced that Willerson, a world renowned cardiologist, will succeed famed heart surgeon Denton Cooley, M.D. Willerson will continue sharing his time, attention and energies with two institutions he cherishes, as he has done for the last 15 years.
“Most people know that I bleed burnt orange, and the UT Health Science Center is a special love of mine, as is the Texas Heart Institute,” Willerson said. “I’ll do everything I can to help these two institutions, and I am grateful for the opportunity to play a leadership role at each one. My goal is to continue to foster enhanced collaboration between these two institutions and among other institutions in the Texas Medical Center.”
The Texas Heart Institute was founded in 1962 for the study and treatment of diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Together with the institute’s clinical partner, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, it has been ranked among the nation’s top 10 heart centers in an annual survey published by U.S. News & World Report for the past 14 years.
Frequently conveying the view that “while the Texas Medical Center was built on competition, it will survive and thrive on collaboration,” Willerson has been working for a number of years to foster TMC partnerships. The recent split between Baylor College of Medicine and its former primary teaching hospital, The Methodist Hospital, has further encouraged Willerson to seek creative ways to bring health-related institutions closer together.
“The new opportunity at the Texas Heart Institute will allow me to continue to work on Texas Medical Center John P. McGovern, M.D. collaborations,” Willerson said. “For example, I would like to see the Texas Heart Institute have very strong ties to both our local medical schools, UT and Baylor.”
Willerson has served as THI medical director since 1993. He arrived in Houston in 1989 from UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to become chairman of internal medicine at the UT Medical School at Houston. A distinguished alumnus of UT Austin, Willerson received his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 1965, during which time he trained under Cooley. He also has been designated a distinguished alumnus of Baylor College of Medicine.
Cooley and his successor have been close associates and good friends for many years. “I have known Jim Willerson since he was 14 years old,” Cooley said in a 2001 interview. “His mother and father were practicing physicians in San Antonio. I frequently went there during those early years for the development of our cardiovascular program in Houston, and I met the Drs. Willerson and Jim and his brother.”
Cooley, who is clinical professor of cardiothoracic and vascular surgery at the UT Medical School said that Willerson’s “considerable talents, his extraordinary commitment to research and education, and his unparalleled dedication bode well for our Heart Institute, and I look to the future with a strong sense of optimism.”
Willerson expressed gratitude for the new appointment. “I am truly honored to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Cooley to lead the Texas Heart Institute,” Willerson said. “I am grateful for the confidence shown by him now and over so many years.”
Willerson is one of only 14 recipients of the Distinguished Scientists designation by the American Heart Association. Last year, he also was honored by the International Academy of Cardiovascular Sciences with its Medal of Merit, saluting his “lifetime of exceptional accomplishments.”
Willerson is credited with pioneering research to better understand the role of so-called “vulnerable plaque” that can cause thrombosis or blood clots to form in an injured coronary artery, leading to heart attack and its consequences. Willerson and S. Ward Casscells, M.D., have developed recent insights that allow vulnerable plaques to be detected before they lead to heart attacks.
More recently, Willerson, working with Emerson Perrin, M.D., has played a key role in collaborative research involving the Texas Heart Institute and the UT Health Science Center, which uses an adult patient’s own stem cells to improve the blood flow to and the function of a severely damaged heart.
Under Willerson’s leadership the UT Health Science Center has begun a period of campus growth, with six new facilities just completed, under construction or in the planning stages. The School of Nursing and Student Community Center opened this summer, and construction is well under way for a new home for the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, a research entity that was the brainchild of Willerson soon after his arrival in Houston. In the last two years the university has raised an unprecedented $183 million for the new IMM building.
Plans are well under way for the Medical School’s Research Replacement Building, which will go up on the site of the current John Freeman Building. Groundbreaking is scheduled for the spring of 2005. Also in the planning stage are an expansion to the UT School of Public Health building, a new building for the university’s Mental Sciences Institute, and a new home for the UT Dental Branch, which celebrates its centennial in 2005.
“I am enormously proud of what our faculty, staff, students and friends have accomplished working together to advance the mission of the UT Health Science Center at Houston in recent years,” Willerson said. “We have turned quite a few challenges into opportunities, but much work remains ahead of us. I look forward to continuing our current momentum to advance this university, just as I am committed to helping build the Texas Heart Institute to even higher levels of excellence in research, education and patient care.”
— By Jane Brust, Public Affairs