Dr.Pradeep Natarajan To Receive American Heart Association Award
India-West News Desk
WASHINGTON, DC – Pradeep Natarajan, a cardiovascular geneticist who joined Amgen earlier this year, will receive the American Heart Association’s 2026 Population Research Prize at its Scientific Sessions in Chicago.
Natarajan, M.D., M.M.Sc., FAHA, joined Amgen in August as vice president of global research, head of human genetics and head of the Cardiometabolic Therapeutic Area. He remains a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a distinguished physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Natarajan has spent his research career studying cardiovascular disease through human genetics and large population datasets. His work includes research into lipid disorders, coronary artery disease, clonal hematopoiesis and cardiovascular risk prediction.
He has authored or co-authored more than 330 peer-reviewed publications and has led several NIH-funded studies. One of those projects, funded through the NIH Common Fund, received $11.2 million and focuses on somatic mosaicism across human tissues.
Natarajan has also been involved with the American Heart Association for more than a decade. He has volunteered with the organization since 2011 and has chaired its Data Science and Precision Medicine Committee since 2024. He has served on the Scientific Sessions Planning Committee since 2021 and participated in writing groups on polygenic risk scores, direct-to-consumer genetic testing and clonal hematopoiesis.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He later earned a master of medical sciences degree in biomedical informatics from Harvard Medical School.
His previous honors include election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2022 and the Association of American Physicians in 2024. He received the American Heart Association’s Joseph A. Vita Award in 2023 and its Genomic and Precision Medicine Mid-Career Award in 2025.
