Dr. Mark Creager Named to Anna Gundlach Huber Professorship in Medicine

Mark Creager, MD, has been named the Anna Gundlach Huber Professor in Medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Creager, a professor of medicine and surgery at Geisel since 2015, also directs the Heart and Vascular Center (HVC) within the Dartmouth-Hitchcock health system. He is the Immediate Past President of the American Heart Association.

“Dr. Creager’s passion for improving the cardiovascular health of his patients and the community, for high-impact research, and for offering the best training and education to our students and residents represents the very best of academic medicine,” says Duane Compton, PhD, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine.

The Anna Gundlach Huber Professorship was established in 1984 by Gertrude H. Mertens to honor her mother. Gertrude and her sister, Marion Huber, had established another chair in 1981 to honor their father, Joseph M. Huber. The family’s connection with Dartmouth began in the 1960s, when Gertrude’s husband was treated with such warmth by a doctor on the Dartmouth faculty that they wanted to ensure that future generations of medical students would learn to give such care. Since then, members of the family have made numerous generous gifts to the Geisel School, especially to scholarships. The Mertens-Huber Scholarship Fund is the largest scholarship endowment at Geisel.

“It’s a great honor to be appointed to the Anna Gundlach Huber Professorship,” says Creager. “I am very grateful to the Mertens-Huber family, who cares deeply about improving patient care and training highly skilled, compassionate physicians. These precepts form the foundation of my role as a professor for Geisel and as director of the Heart and Vascular Center.”

As a leader of the American Heart Association and director of the HVC, Creager is working to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease for individuals and populations. As a researcher, he’s advancing medicine’s understanding of the mechanisms of atherosclerosis and studying the effect of medical therapy in patients with vascular disease. He is also an editor of the textbook Vascular Medicine and has authored more than 350 contributions to the medical literature, including research papers on vascular function, book chapters, and monographs on vascular disease.

Creager is a recipient of the Vascular Disease Foundation President’s Award for Leadership and the American Heart Association Distinguished National Leadership Award. He is Past President and Master of the Society for Vascular Medicine, Past President of the Vascular Disease Foundation, a Fellow of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and a member of the Society of Clinical Investigation.

Before coming to Dartmouth, Creager served as Director of the Vascular Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital from 1995 to 2012. He also has served as Senior Physician and Head of the Vascular Medicine Section of the Cardiovascular Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Creager was appointed Professor of Medicine at Harvard University in 2003.

After earning his medical degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pa., he completed his internship and residency in medicine at University Hospital in Boston, Mass., followed by a clinical and research fellowship in peripheral vascular disease at University Hospital and the Evans Foundation, as well as a clinical fellowship in cardiology at University Hospital and Boston City Hospital (which later merged to form Boston Medical Center).