Gordon A. Ewy, MD
The Gordon A. Ewy, MD, Endowed Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine

Gordon A. Ewy, MD, has been the director of the Sarver Heart Center since 1991. As director, he redefined its mission and vision, recruited more than 100 physicians and scientists and recognized their 10 research focus areas, developed outreach programs, including the newsletter and public lecture series, and helped in a successful fund-raising drive to finance the new Sarver Heart Center building. “The strengths of the Sarver Heart Center lie in the quality of our members and our coworkers and our commitment to a future free of heart, vascular disease and stroke via the academic principles of research, education and patient care,” Dr. Ewy says. “To build on this solid foundation, we recognize the importance of endowments to attract additional world class scientists, who share in our dream, to the Sarver Heart Center.”

Dr. Ewy also is Professor and Chief of Cardiology at the University of Arizona of College of Medicine and Director of the University of Arizona Cardiology Fellowship Training Program.

He obtained his BA and MD from the University of Kansas, where he graduated Alpha Omega Alpha, and completed his residency and cardiology fellowship training at Georgetown University.

Dr. Ewy has made significant research contributions in several areas, including the pharmacokinetics of digoxin, defibrillation and cardioversion, CPR, and hemodynamic correlates of cardiovascular physical findings. For his many contributions in the field of defibrillation and CPR, he was recognized in 2000 by the American Heart Association as a “CPR Giant,” a title held by fewer than 20 people in the world.

A Fellow of both the Council on Clinical Cardiology of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Ewy has served in various capacities in both organizations, including the Board of Trustees and Chairman of the Learning Center Committee and the Emergency Cardiac Care Committee of the ACC. Dr. Ewy is on the editorial board of three medical journals.

A former teaching scholar of the American Heart Association, Dr. Ewy has received a number of teaching awards, including the Furrow Award for Excellence in Postgraduate Education. He has directed a number of post-graduate educational programs in cardiology and currently co-directs the annual “Cardiology Update” held each year at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City and “Tutorial in the Tetons” held in Jackson Hole, Wyo., each summer. He has been invited to serve in visiting professorships at several medical schools, including the W. Proctor Harvey Visiting Professorship at Georgetown and The Lemberg Visiting Professor at the University of Miami, and is one of the Seymour Medalists as a visiting professor at the University of Kansas.

He helped to create the teaching material for the teaching mannequin “Harvey,” developed by his colleague Michael Gordon, MD, PhD, at the University of Miami.

Dr. Ewy has had an active practice of cardiology in Tucson since the opening of the University Hospital in 1971 and is listed in several publications as among the “Best Doctors in America.”

Dr. Ewy is the author/editor of four books, four monographs, and over 400 original scientific publications, editorials, book chapters and reviews.

He is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Diseases, and recently completed a six-year rotation as a member of the American Board of Internal Medicine Subspecialty Board on Cardiovascular Disease, which writes the examination for board certification for cardiologists wanting to become board certified in cardiovascular diseases.

On a more personal note, he likes to point out that 40 percent of the people from his hometown are physicians—his older brother (a cardiovascular surgeon) and himself. The “town” in western Kansas had a population of five: his father, who managed the wheat elevator; his mother, who ran the filling-station/general store; and their three sons. Theirs was the only house.

He served in the United States Navy as an Ensign and First Lieutenant aboard the USS Begor, APD 127. He was a line officer and not a medical officer as he was in the service before going to medical school. According to Dr. Ewy, his greatest accomplishment was convincing Priscilla R. Welbon to marry him! It took three years of letter writing; they were engaged by a trans-Pacific telephone call. They have three children, Kim Elizabeth, Gordon Stuart, and Mark Allen.