Clinical Research

Eric Peterson, M.D.

Vice Provost and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research, Vice President for Health System Research, and Professor, Internal Medicine

Eric Peterson, M.D.

Holder of the Adelyn and Edmund M. Hoffman Distinguished Chair in Medical Science

Eric Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., an internationally acclaimed leader in cardiovascular clinical research, joined UT Southwestern Medical Center in November 2020 as the inaugural Vice Provost and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research and as Vice President for Health System Research.

Dr. Peterson joined UT Southwestern from Duke University, where he was a distinguished tenured professor in the Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine from 2006 through October 2020 and where he served as Executive Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. At Duke, Dr. Peterson led numerous multicenter clinical trials, prospective registries, and implementation programs.

He currently serves as Principal Investigator of the Analytic Centers for American College of Cardiology’s National Cardiac Database, the American Heart Association’s Get With the Guidelines Database, and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons’ National Cardiac Surgery Database. He also is Principal Investigator of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Spironolactone Initiation Registry Randomized Interventional Trial (SPIRRIT) in Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction and leads several ongoing industry-sponsored clinical trials, registries, and implementation research studies.

With more than 1,400 peer-reviewed publications to date, Dr. Peterson ranks among the top 1 percent of published researchers in clinical medicine and has been named one of the most highly cited researchers in the world by Thomson Reuters.

Dr. Peterson earned his medical degree from University of Pittsburgh and completed his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also completed a fellowship in general internal medicine at Harvard University and a fellowship in cardiology at Duke University.

Robert Toto, M.D.

Robert Toto, M.D.

  • Associate Dean, Translational Science and Education