When Dr. John Warner completed his one-year term as the 81^st President of the American Heart Association in July, he confidently handed off the voluntary position to Dr. Ivor Benjamin, a cardiologist who possessed outstanding personal and professional traits that Dr. Warner had witnessed firsthand at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

“As an intern, Ivor was my first attending cardiologist,” said Dr. Warner, Executive Vice President for Health System Affairs, CEO of UT Southwestern’s University Hospitals, and Professor of Internal Medicine. “He was both challenging and supportive in our training.”

Dr. Benjamin, a native of the small South American nation of Guyana – who immigrated with his family after high school – excelled at Hunter College and took advantage of a summer enrichment program for minority students to do cardiovascular physiology research. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and completing his residency and internship at Yale, Dr. Benjamin earned a Minority Medical Faculty Development Award. That award allowed him to join a lab at Duke University Medical Center, where he studied molecular cardiology under Dr. R. Sanders Williams.

In 1990, Dr. Williams became Division Chief of Cardiology at UT Southwestern, and Dr. Benjamin arrived on campus that same year as a research fellow in Molecular Biology. Dr. Benjamin joined the faculty in 1992. As a new attending cardiologist in Dallas, he soon found himself working with medical resident Dr. Warner, a West Texas native and Abilene Christian University alum recently returned to his home state after graduating from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1992.

More than 25 years later, Drs. Warner and Benjamin continue to embrace their commonalities. Dr. Benjamin served on the UTSW faculty for more than a decade before being named Division Chief of Cardiology at the University of Utah in 2003. His commitment to improve cardiovascular health and to reduce cardiovascular disease and stroke everywhere began in Dallas with scientific work such as peer-review committee duties. He has directed the Cardiovascular Center at The Medical College of Wisconsin since 2013.

“As AHA leaders we look at challenges as opportunity. Where others see scarcity, we see possibility,” Dr. Benjamin said at the start of his term on July 1. “We have an abundance of possibilities ahead of us.”