Gary H. Gibbons is director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, where he oversees the third-largest institute at the NIH, with an annual budget of approximately $3 billion and a staff of nearly 2,100 federal employees, contractors, and volunteers. NHLBI provides global leadership for research, training, and education programs to promote the prevention and treatment of heart, lung, and blood diseases and to enhance the health of all individuals so that they can live longer and more fulfilling lives.

Since being named director of the NHLBI, Gibbons has enhanced the institute’s investment in fundamental discovery science, steadily increasing the pay line and number of awards for established and early stage investigators. His commitment to nurturing the next generation of scientists is manifest in expanded funding for career development and loan repayment awards as well as initiatives to facilitate the transition to independent research awards.

Gibbons provides leadership to advance several NIH initiatives and has made many scientific contributions in the fields of vascular biology, genomic medicine, and the pathogenesis of vascular diseases. His research focuses on investigating the relationships between clinical phenotypes, behavior, molecular interactions, and social determinants on gene expression and their contribution to cardiovascular disease. Gibbons has received several patents for innovations derived from his research in the fields of vascular biology and the pathogenesis of vascular diseases.

Gibbons earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency and cardiology fellowship at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Gibbons was a member of the faculty at Stanford University from 1990 to 1996, and at Harvard Medical School from 1996 to 1999. He joined the Morehouse School of Medicine in 1999, where he served as the founding director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute, chairperson of the Department of Physiology, and professor of physiology and medicine at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Gibbons served as a member of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Advisory Council from 2009 to 2012.

Throughout his career, Gibbons has received numerous honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences; selection as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Minority Faculty Development Awardee; selection as a Pew Foundation Biomedical Scholar; and recognition as an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association.