Jeffrey Winterfield MD

Biography

I am an Endowed Chair of Medicine with primary clinical responsibilities as the Chief of Cardiac Electrophysiology at the Medical University of South Carolina. I have a background in basic scientific research with early work in ion channel biophysics. My early career interests as a medical trainee centered on diseases of electrical instability in heart and brain, and I weighed careers in neurology/epilepsy vs cardiology/electrophysiology. Ultimately, I pursued clinical cardiology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and my interests in long QT syndrome with translational electrophysiologist Dr. David Milan led me to a career and further fellowship training in heart rhythm disorders. During training with Dr. William Stevenson at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, my interests shifted to ventricular arrhythmias in cardiomyopathy patients, and I then committed my career to academic clinical cardiac electrophysiology with a primary niche in ventricular tachycardia (VT) management. In 2011, I took my first faculty position in the prestigious heart rhythm program at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago under the leadership of Dr. David Wilber, the inaugural editor-in-chief of JACC Cardiac Electrophysiology. During that time in Chicago, I published multiple papers and abstracts, participated as a principal investigator in clinical trials regarding complex rhythm management, and served as faculty in national and international meetings. In 2016, I was recruited to Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) for my expertise in catheter ablation of complex arrhythmias, particularly ventricular tachycardia (VT) and premature ventricular contractions (PVCs), in advanced cardiomyopathy patients. During my time at MUSC, research and clinical work has focused on management of VT in special substrates, particularly in cases where conventional ablation tools fail to deliver adequate therapy for successful elimination of the arrhythmia. Additionally, we work at the interface of computer science, signals processing, and imaging with digital twin models of ventricular structures to develop comprehensive patient specific approaches to targeting and ablation of VT. Our work has been published in some of the most prestigious cardiac electrophysiology journals including JACC Cardiac Electrophysiology and Heart Rhythm.