Ali Khoynezhad MD PhD, FACS

Summary

• I am a cardiovascular and aortic surgeon with 30 years of clinical experience — and for the past three years, my primary work has been building something from scratch.
  
  Since 2023, I have served as Chief Medical Officer of Avicenna MD, LLC, a structural heart valve medical device startup. I lead clinical strategy and development direction, oversee prototyping alongside a team of scientists and engineers, and have been actively involved in fundraising. I am now moving fully into industry, and this transition has been three years in the making.
  
  The through-line of my career has always been three things: operating, training other physicians, and pushing the field forward through clinical research.
  
  On training — I have personally trained over 550 surgeons and interventionalists nationally in endovascular aortic repair and atrial fibrillation procedures, working with Medtronic, AtriCure, Bard, Gore, and Terumo. That is not a number from a slide deck. Those are physicians I stood beside in operating rooms and catheterization labs until the technique was theirs.
  
  On research — I have served as National Principal Investigator on more than 20 industry-sponsored clinical trials. That includes the DEEP trial for persistent atrial fibrillation with AtriCure, presented at AHA 2023 and published in Circulation: Electrophysiology, and the ascending aortic IDE study with Medtronic — the first FDA-approved pathway for endovascular repair of the ascending aorta.
  
  H-index of 38. I have. 245+ peer-reviewed publications, that are cited by 5838 publications. . I know what it takes to design a trial, enroll it, execute it, and communicate the data to physicians who are skeptical and have twenty minutes between cases.
  
  I am now focused on medical affairs, physician education and training programs, and general consultations, clinical research leadership in the medical device industry — specifically in structural heart, aortic, and cardiac rhythm management.