H. Wilson Tang, MD is Research Director, and staff cardiologist in the Section of Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation Medicine in the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Tang is Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Tang’s specialty interests include cardiomyopathy, heart failure including heart transplantation and mechanical circulatory assist devices, cardio-renal diseases, and cancer-related heart diseases. Dr. Tang graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in neural sciences from Brown University in Rhode Island, where he matriculated at Jesus College, Cambridge University, in England for an honorary one-year period of study in molecular medicine. Dr. Tang received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and completed his internship and residency in internal medicine, and a research fellowship in heart failure at Stanford University Medical Center. This was followed by clinical cardiology fellowship training at the Cleveland Clinic, and an advanced clinical fellowship in heart failure and cardiac transplantation. He was appointed to Cleveland Clinic in 2004 as a Staff Physician in the Section of Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantation Medicine. Dr. Tang is board-certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, and advanced heart failure and transplant cardiology.

Dr. Tang was the first to observe disproportionately low natriuretic peptide levels in some symptomatic heart failure patients, which led to the discovery of disproportionally lower natriuretic peptide expression in obese patients. Dr. Tang’s seminal mechanistic insights in acute cardio-renal syndrome revealed important contributions of venous congestion and raised intra-abdominal pressures rather than insufficient cardiac output or acute renal tubular injury, which served the physiologic basis of several novel device therapies for cardio-renal syndrome. He also demonstrated the prognostic value of abnormal chloride homeostasis and clinical utility of directly assessing natriuretic responses to diuretic therapy that has now incorporated as part of the latest European clinical guideline recommendations for management of acute heart failure.  Through his leadership role in NHLBI’s Clinical Heart Failure network, he helped design and led numerous important therapeutic clinical trials in acute and chronic heart failure that informed clinical practice. He also has leadership role in the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Clinical and Translational Sciences Collaborative, overseeing the Hub Research Capacity and directs the Cleveland Clinic Clinical Research Unit that specialized in early-phase clinical studies.

Dr. Tang is a clinician-scientist interested in clinical translational research, with joint appointments with the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and the Genomic Medicine Institute at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute. He leads the Cleveland GeneBank Study as well as the Cleveland Heart and Metabolic Prevention Study to investigate novel mechanisms in the development of heart diseases. His current research interests include the role of counter-regulatory mechanisms in the development and progression of heart failure, integrative genomics and epigenetics in cardiomyopathies, and metabolomics in cardio-renal physiology.  His recent pioneering work in human studies linking dietary-induced, gut microbiota-produced trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) to adverse cardiovascular outcomes and contributions of its renal handling has helped pave the way to better understand the role of dietary nutrients in cardiometabolic health and disease and the development of novel treatment strategies for patients with heart failure and chronic kidney disease. Dr. Tang was elected as member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation in 2013 for his contributions to physiologic and mechanistic understanding of cardio-renal syndromes, as well as the Association of American Physicians in 2018 for studying the contributing role of diet and microbiome in cardiovascular diseases.  He is also the recipient of the American College of Cardiology’s 2022 Distinguished Scientist Award in the Basic Domain.  Dr. Tang has authored over 765 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and 88 book chapters (h-index 99) and has been named one of the Global Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics for the last five consecutive years.  He currently serves in the Editorial Boards for Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) Heart Failure, JACC Cardio-Oncology, Circulation Heart Failure, and American Heart Journal.