Tulane-Xavier MHIRT Program

Site 6- Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China

The China site is based primarily at Soochow University in Suzhou, a city of one million inhabitants located in suburban Shanghai. Soochow University is one of the best known and most prestigious universities in China.

U.S. Mentor
Jiang He, MD, PhD, is chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Tulane University SPHTM and is the principal investigator of several NIH-supported studies of cardiovascular diseases. He is a visiting professor of cardiovascular genetics at the Chinese National Human Genome Center in Beijing, P.R. China. He has seven current projects for U.S. and China-based research on the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease, and he has trained numerous post-doctoral and PhD students. He is originally from China and maintains active collaborations with several Chinese universities and institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, China's equivalent of the NIH.

Overseas Mentor
Yonghong Zhang, MD, PhD, is chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Soochow University. Dr. Zhang is currently the principal investigator of a genetic and molecular epidemiological study on hypertension in Mongolian people and serological studies on correlations between inflammation and hypertension on coronary heart disease induced by hypertension. His research interests include the etiology and prevention and control of hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and stroke, as well as the genetic epidemiology of these diseases.

Research Areas
The focus of collaborative research at the China site is population-based studies of the epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases, which is the primary research topic of a large collaborative group of investigators based in the Department of Epidemiology at Tulane University SPHTM. Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality among African-Americans and other groups in the United States, where an estimated 42 million individuals have hypertension. The Tulane group has made numerous contributions in this field, including the well-known Bogalusa Heart Study of cardiovascular disease risk factors in children. This expertise in field-based research of chronic diseases is now being applied in a native Chinese population, where studies of cardiovascular disease are relatively few.