Alumni Profile: Elaine Wan'05

By Julia Hickey González
A mouse’s heart is the size of a pinky nail and beats at least 600 times per minute. That has not stopped Elaine Wan’05, director of electrophysiology research at VP&S, from the daunting task of developing algorithms to precisely map its electrical activity in an NIH-funded study that has expanded the possibilities of testing where and why irregular heartbeats, or arrhythmias, emerge.
“Before, everything was in two dimensions. In my lab, we are offering 3-D visualization. The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words,” she says.
Dr. Wan’s extensive basic science and translational research inform her clinical practice as the Esther Aboodi Associate Professor of Medicine in Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology at VP&S, where her use of novel imaging techniques is already improving precision treatments for human heart surgery patients.
Being a physician-scientist is really two jobs at the same time, she says. “Those of us interested in academia are also teaching students, residents, and fellows. That becomes a third job. Everyone asks me how I split my time, and I say I am 100%, 100%, 100%.”
On any day, you might find Dr. Wan leading lab meetings, consulting expectant mothers with heart arrhythmias, performing invasive electrophysiology procedures such as pacemaker implantation or cardiac ablation, or presenting a lecture to medical students on electrical malfunctions of the heart. She was one of the principal investigators in a clinical trial utilizing improved pacemakers as small as bullets. She also holds three patents on surgical tools and imaging techniques.
In addition to her duties at Columbia, Dr. Wan holds national advisory roles, including as a trustee on the board of the Heart Rhythm Society and as chair elect of the American Heart Association Committee on Arrhythmias and Electrocardiography. These groups are tasked with determining how best to incorporate the immense heart rate data from smartphones and smartwatches into health care and to develop the latest scientific statement to guide the treatment of heart arrhythmias.
Dr. Wan’s professional commitments are immense, but she delights in seeing her findings directly improve patient outcomes. “For example, a patient comes in having heart palpitations. We find out they have an arrhythmia. We do an electrocardiogram, and usually in the past we’d use the EKG and say, ‘I think the arrhythmia is coming from here, but I won’t know for sure until we actually do the procedure and put the catheters into your heart.’”
By collaborating with biomedical scientists for specialized ultrasound imaging, Dr. Wan hopes to noninvasively identify the likely location of an arrhythmia and its mechanism and to shorten the procedure time for ablation in her patients. In Fall 2024, she received a 5-year NIH grant alongside principal investigators Dr. Angelo Biviano and Dr. Elisa Konofagou to deepen their investigations into a novel ultrasound imaging technique called electromechanical wave imaging and its ability to visualize the activation and mechanism of cardiac arrhythmias.
“I think what is unique about a physician-scientist is bringing what they call the ‘bench to the bedside’—translating what you see in patients and then trying to find applications of what you see underneath the microscope or at the bench and how that can be transformed to meaningful treatment therapeutics for your patients,” she explains.
An Early Commitment
Dr. Wan knew at a young age that she wanted to be a surgeon.
“I was always very adept at using my hands,” she recalls.
As a child, she practiced embroidery and took pleasure in perfectly filleting a fish. She was drawn to science, even though her parents ran an art gallery.
Dr. Wan grew up in Fresh Meadows, Queens, but spent countless hours on the subway heading into Manhattan. During high school, she worked after school and summers in a lab at Rockefeller University. She researched drug-resistant bacteria and learned from her colleagues the meticulous methods and devotion that would inspire her research career.
She graduated from MIT, entered Columbia for medical school, and has never left—completing training in internal medicine, clinical cardiology, and invasive cardiac electrophysiology. As the late Anke Nolting, associate dean and executive director of development and alumni relations at VP&S, used to tell her: “Elaine, you are a product of Columbia.”
“I definitely am,” Dr. Wan says, “because I graduated there from the medical school, stayed there for residency, fellowship, super fellowship, and I have been on faculty for over 10 years. So I love Columbia. I am proud of Columbia and thankful for my experiences there.”
A self-described “nerd,” she respected her medical school classmates’ diverse extracurricular and athletic interests. “I totally appreciate the reason why we needed to celebrate the diversity. Some of us ended up being orthopedic surgeons. Some of us ended up being pediatricians. Some of us ended up being radiologists or internists.”
But her time at VP&S has not been without challenges. During medical school, a classmate died in a tragic accident. David Huang, her anatomy partner, had traveled to Utah with a group of medical students to celebrate finishing his STEP 1 board examinations. Several students jumped into a lake, and David drowned. Dr. Wan first believed it to be a cruel joke when another anatomy partner broke the news because it seemed so improbable. David was an athlete with no known medical conditions.
“It made us appreciate life more, the fragility of it. It just reminds us to strive to be the best we can be, like David always did, because we don’t know how much time is granted to us,” she said, adding, “I don’t think that’s the reason why I have three jobs, but it adds to an appreciation for life and trying to do our best.”
Indeed, Dr. Wan does not shrink in the face of challenge, be it scientific, professional, or personal. The day before this interview, she was faced with a rare surgical case in which the patient’s heart was located on the right side of the chest instead of the left, a mirror image of the norm.
“Fortunately, this was not my first rodeo,” she says. Throughout her training at Columbia, Dr. Wan encountered some of the country’s most complex cardiac cases.
She is also committed to creating inroads for women in medicine and female physicians in science, especially in electrophysiology. Despite increasing numbers of female physicians in the United States, only 5% of electrophysiologists are women, and 20% of states do not have a single female EP operator. Arrhythmias during pregnancy are common, and Dr. Wan believes it’s important for patients to have access to female electrophysiologists.
As the mother of two young children, she brings that understanding to her pregnant patients and knows firsthand the balancing act of motherhood. Indeed, Dr. Wan made sacrifices during her own two pregnancies and postpartum to keep up with her professional demands. Never entirely on “leave,” she continued to mentor students, hold lab meetings, and write grants after giving birth to each of her children.
“Being a woman physician-scientist is quite rare. I think that we have to acknowledge that women will continue to have success in our careers, but that there will be time points, pregnancy and postpartum, that it will likely be a little more difficult to be as successful as some others would like us to be.”
Dr. Wan wants to acknowledge the challenges faced by female physician-scientists while highlighting that they are temporary in the long arc of one’s career and life.
“Sometimes you just want to focus on all your accomplishments but not on the difficult times. We want younger women to stay in research, to understand that there are some difficult times, but they can be overcome.”
She adds that continued institutional support for physician-scientists throughout the middle of their careers—not just for fresh graduates or tenured investigators—is critical to retention in such a demanding environment.
Atrial Fibrillation: The Golden Fleece
Ultimately, Dr. Wan stays motivated by her vision of a future in which doctors can identify who is at higher risk of developing arrhythmias and visualize where in the heart an arrhythmia is predisposed to happen, offering personalized preventive treatments.
The most common form of irregular heartbeat, atrial fibrillation, affects more than 5 million Americans per year and increases their chances of heart failure or stroke. Dr. Wan describes AFib as a “tornado in the heart. The eye of the tornado is moving around the heart. We don’t know why the eye of the tornado is only moving in certain places of the heart.”
Therapies for treating AFib, such as ablation with a catheter, destroy tissue in the process. Scientists have tried for decades to determine the causes of AFib, to no avail.
To clarify the challenge, Dr. Wan cites oncology: “Cancer is just one cell, one cell type, multiplying many times. If you can treat the cell, you can solve the problem. In AFib, we know it is not one cell or one problem—there are probably many more mechanisms that need to be targeted.”
For Dr. Wan, mapping the mouse heart was just one early step in the increasingly complex investigation to determine the primary mechanisms of this prevalent heart arrhythmia.
For electrophysiologists, finding the cause of AFib is the “Golden Fleece,” she says—that faraway treasure of Greek myth, guarded by fire-breathing bulls and a dragon, that Jason and the Argonauts were tasked with retrieving through a long and arduous journey.
“A lot of medicine is really about the clinical trials because basic science is difficult,” she says. But difficult things are worth doing. “Understanding the mechanisms of disease is important.”