Michelle Kittleson is Director of Education in Heart Failure and Transplantation, Director of Heart Failure Research, and Professor of Medicine at the Smidt Heart Institute, Cedars-Sinai.  She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard and medical degree from Yale.  She completed residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital and cardiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where she received a PhD in Clinical Investigation from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  She is Deputy Editor of the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, on Guideline Writing Committees for the American College of Cardiology (ACC)/American Heart Association, is the Co Editor-in-Chief for the ACC Heart Failure Self-Assessment Program, and on the Board of Directors for the Heart Failure Society of America.  Her essays have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA Cardiology and poems in JAMA and Annals of Internal Medicine.