UH Caregiver Named 2022 Crain's Notable Immigrant Leader

Crain's 2022 Notable Immigrant Leader award recognizes immigrants who have contributed to the city of Cleveland's rich diversity as well as its economic growth and cultural heritage. As President of the UH Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute, Mehdi Shishehbor, DO, MPH, PhD, Angela and James Hambrick Chair in Innovation, has dedicated his career to saving the limbs of patients with severe vascular disease and finding alternative treatments to amputation.

According to Crain's Cleveland Business, “It would be an understatement to say that Dr. Mehdi Shishehbor has a come a long way since fleeing his native Iran for the U.S. at age 14."

Dr. Shishehbor had left his native country without his parents during the Iran-Iraq war to live with a brother in Florida. He put himself through college and medical school, rising to become an internationally renown interventional cardiologist with expertise in vascular medicine and minimally invasive procedures to prevent amputations.

Crain's recognized Dr. Shishehbor for creating the Limb Salvage Advisory Council (LSAC) that evaluates alternative treatments to amputations and improves outcomes for patients with limb-threatening ischemia, a condition in which blood flow is restricted to parts of the body. It is now being used as a model in other health institutions across the nation. They also lauded him for training over 300 physicians locally and nationally on techniques to avoid amputation and save limbs.

A National Institutes of Health scholar, Dr. Shishehbor and his team of interventional cardiologists and cardiac surgeons were also the first in the U.S. to report a safer, minimally invasive strategy for removing infections in the heart associated with right-sided infective endocarditis.

Additionally, under his leadership UH was named a top-50 facility for Cardiology and Heart Surgery (38th) by U.S. News and World Report.

Read the full list from Crain's.