Donna Mancini, MD was named the ​2024 HFSA Pioneer Award winner.

I am a native New Yorker born and raised on the Lower East Side to second generation Italian immigrant family. I attended Fordham University and then Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. My internal medicine internship, residency and cardiology fellowship were also done at Albert Einstein. Prior to the cardiology fellowship, I did a year of dedicated heart failure research with Drs Edmund Sonnenblick and Thierry LeJemtel who introduced me to heart failure and exercise physiology. This was a transformational year which launched my career in heart failure. 

I have been a heart failure and transplant cardiologist for over 40 years.  My clinical research has been focused on heart failure therapies, exercise physiology, risk stratification of heart failure patients for cardiac transplantation and mechanical assist devices as well as post-transplant immune therapy and care. I have performed physiologic studies for more than three decades delineating the role of peripheral mechanisms underlying exertional intolerance, and defining methods for risk stratifying patients with heart failure. My work on the use of cardiopulmonary exercise testing and the creation of a heart failure survival score have received international recognition. I have published over 400 papers and mentored more than 30 trainees. I was elected to the American Federation of Clinical Research in 1999 and was the first recipient of the Sudhir Choudhrie Chair of Cardiology at Columbia University in 2009. I directed the Center for Advanced Cardiac Care at Columbia University (formerly Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplant Program), and also its clinical trials unit before arriving in Mount Sinai in 2016 where I also directed the heart failure and transplant program at Sinai and across its network of 7 hospitals. In June 2024, I stepped away from clinical practice though I continue to work on clinical research grants.