Steven R. Houser has been elected to serve as president-elect of the American Heart Association (AHA). Houser is the senior associate dean of research, the Vera J. Goodfriend Endowed Chair of Cardiovascular Research and director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Temple University School of Medicine (TUSM).

Houser’s one-year term as president-elect began on July 1 and runs through June 30, 2016. He will then serve a one-year term as AHA president beginning July 1, 2016. Houser was elected by the board of directors of the AHA, the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke.

The AHA’s stated mission is to fund innovative research, fight for stronger public health policies, and provide critical tools and information to save and improve lives. The AHA includes more than 22.5 million volunteers and supporters.

An internationally respected cardiovascular researcher, Houser has been a Temple faculty member for more than three decades. His research group has helped define many fundamental features of the normal cardiac myocyte (a muscle cell) and identified defective molecular and cellular processes that produce abnormal cardiac myocyte function in cardiovascular disease. In 2012, the group was awarded a five-year $11.6 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to develop new approaches to prevent, slow or reverse damage to the heart after a heart attack.

Houser earned his PhD in physiology and completed a research fellowship at TUSM. He joined the Temple faculty as an assistant professor of physiology in 1979 and was named director of the Cardiovascular Research Center in 2003 and chair of the Department of Physiology in 2006. Houser is also a professor of physiology and a professor of medicine at TUSM.

During Houser’s long association with the AHA, he has served as a board member, chair of the research committee and president of the southeastern Pennsylvania affiliate. He has also worked on a number of national AHA committees.