Council Position: Founding President
Professor John Chambers became a consultant cardiologist in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in 2009. His specialist interests are cardiac imaging and heart valve disease.
Cardiac Imaging – He founded the echocardiography department at Guy’s Hospital. He was involved with setting up national accreditation programmes for transthoracic and transoesophageal echocardiography and for setting up departmental accreditation, a process which subsequently extended to Europe. He was chief examiner for the British Society of Echocardiography from 1995 – 98, chair of the British Society of Echocardiography (BSE) Education Committee 1996-8 to and BSE President 2003-2005. He is an associate editor for the journal Echo Research and Practice.
Valve disease – He has a career-long interest in valve disease. His MD thesis was on the early detection of prosthetic valve dysfunction. He founded the Heart Valve Group performing randomised studies of designs of replacement valve, core lab work and studies to determine the optimal timing of surgery for aortic stenosis. He set up a specialist multidisciplinary valve clinic which is a national reference. He is clinical lead for the South East England valve disease network.
He was editor of the Journal of Heart Valve Disease from 1995-2004 and has been on the international advisory board for Heart since 2016. He was a founder member and first President of the British Heart Valve Society (2010-2013).
He is an invited expert on the International Standards Organisation (ISO) panel producing standards for testing heart valve replacements including TAVI. He is also a member of the British Standards Institute (BSI) committee on heart valves. He has been an expert witness at the FDA panel to grant a licence to the Carbomedics valve.
He has written 10 books, co-authored 40 national or international guidance documents and written over 400 papers.