Miguel Valderrabano

Miguel Valderrábano attended medical school in Madrid, Spain, graduating in 1994. Thereafter, he pursued further training in the United States, completing his Internal Medicine training in the UCLA-VA program in Los Angeles, and Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology training at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he also completed a basic research fellowship funded by the American Heart Association. Following training, he joined the faculty at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, where he continued his basic and clinical research as Assistant Professor of Medicine. In 2006, he became the Director of the Division of Cardiac Electrophysiology at the Houston Methodist Hospital, and Professor of Medicine at Weil Cornell School of Medicine. He holds the Lois and Carl Davis Centennial Chair at the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center. His research evolved from basic mechanisms of electrical propagation and cardiac fibrillation using optical mapping in ex vivo hears and cultured cardiomyocytes to more translational and clinical aspects of cardiac electrophysiology. He pioneered the procedure of retrograde ethanol infusion in the vein of Marshall as an ablation tool in the treatment of atrial fibrillation and flutter, and, funded by the NIH, took the procedural technique from conception, to animal validation, and to a completed multi-center clinical trial. He also expanded the retrograde venous ethanol infusion technique to ablation of refractory ventricular tachycardia. He is also known for his contributions in left atrial appendage occlusion procedures for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation.