Christie M. Ballantyne, MD - Director, Section of Artherosclerosis, Professor of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas

James H. O'Keefe Jr., MD - Professor of Medicine, University of Missouri at Kansas City, Mid-America Heart Institute, St. Lukes Hospital

James H. O'Keefe, Jr., M.D., is Director of Preventive Cardiology at the Mid America Heart Institute and Professor of Medicine at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. His postgraduate training included a cardiology fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He has written 135 articles and 6 books on cardiovascular medicine, and he lectures extensively on the role of therapeutic lifestyle changes and drug therapy in cardiovascular risk reduction. He is actively involved in patient care. 

Antonio M. Gotto Jr., MD, DPhil
Dr. Gotto is the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York, New York. He is also Professor of Medicine and Provost for Medical Affairs. He has been National President of the American Heart Association; President of the International Atherosclerosis Society; a member of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Advisory Council and the National Diabetes Advisory Board; and a reviewer of the National Cholesterol Education Program's Third Report on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults. Dr. Gotto speaks nationally and internationally on cardiovascular disease and has contributed more than 500 scholarly articles and books. He and his associates were the first to achieve complete synthesis of a plasma apolipoprotein (apo C-I), and they also determined the complete cDNA and amino acid sequence of apo B-100, one of the largest proteins ever sequenced and a key protein in atherosclerosis.