Dr. Jochen D. Muehlschlegel, MD, MMSc, FAHA

Dr. Danny Muehlschlegel is an attending cardiovascular anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he is also the Vice Chair of Research, the Director of Cardiac Anesthesia Research, and an Associate Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.

As a cardiac anesthesiologist with significant subspecialty training in all aspects of cardiac disease and transesophageal echocardiography, Dr. Muehlschlegel is a perioperative physician guiding the care of very sick patients with cardiovascular disease. His particular expertise is in the area of myocardial injury and its association with cardiac specific biomarker elevation, as well as in defining the role that the ECG has in the acute myocardial injury setting immediately post cardiac surgery.

In addition, Dr. Muehlschlegel is an NIH-funded physician-scientist with an active laboratory examining the impact of genetic variation upon adverse cardiovascular events and their significance on a functional level. He is the Principal Investigator of the TRANSCRIBE study (Transcriptomic Analysis of Left Ventricular Gene Expression), which aims to identify differential expression in human left ventricular myocardium upon exposure to ischemia, examine genetic variants that determine expression changes, and characterize these changes among different disease states.

Dr. Muehlschlegel is also the Chief Scientific Officer of Team Heart, a nonprofit medical organization focused on bringing sustainable cardiac care to Rwanda, a country with a very high incidence of rheumatic heart disease. In Rwanda, he initiated the genetics of rheumatic heart disease (RECHARGE) study, to investigate the genetic signal behind rheumatic heart disease and the molecular changes that accompany the valvular pathology.

• Medical School: Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg, Germany (1994-2001)
• Residency: University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (2002-2006)
• Fellowship: Cardiac Anesthesia, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA (2006-2007)
• Research training: Masters of Medical Science in translational genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (2008-2010)

Recent Publications

1. Sigurdsson MI, Saddic L, Heydarpour M, Chang TW, Shekar P, Aranki SF, Couper GS, Shernan SK, Seidman JG, Body SC, Muehlschlegel JD. Allele-specific Expression in the Human Heart and its Application to Postoperative Atrial Fibrillation and Myocardial Ischemia. Genome Med. 2016 Dec 6;8(1):127. PMID: 27923400
2. Saddic L, Nicoloro SM, Gupta OT, Czech MP, Gorham J, Shernan SK, Seidman CE, Seidman JG, Aranki SF, Body SC, Fitzgibbons TP, Muehlschlegel JD. Joint analysis of left ventricular expression and circulating plasma levels of Omentin after myocardial ischemia. Cardiovasc Diabetol. 2017 Jul 7;16(1):87. PMID: 28687077
3. Sigurdsson MI Saddic L, Heydarpour M, Chang TW, Shekar P, Aranki S, Couper G, Shernan S, Muehlschlegel JD, Body SC. Post-operative atrial fibrillation examined using whole-genome RNA sequencing in human left atrial tissue. BMC Med Genomics. 2017 May 2;10(1):25. PMID: 28464817
4. Butler C, Luxford JMH, Huang CC, Ejiofor JI, Rawn, JD, Wilusz K, Fox JA, Shernan SK, Muehlschlegel JD. Aortic Atheroma Increases the Risk of Long-Term Mortality in 20,000 patients. Ann Thorac Surg. 2017 Oct;104(4):1325-1331. PMID: 28577841
5. Kelly BJ, Ho Luxford JM, Butler CG, Huang CC, Wilusz K, Ejiofor JI, Rawn, JD, Fox JA, Shernan SK, Muehlschlegel JD. Severity of Tricuspid Regurgitation is Associated with Long Term Mortality. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg. 2018 Mar;155(3):1032-1038. PMID: 29246545 

All Publications 

Current Lab Members