Raffaella Lombardi: Steadfast and Committed.

Abstract

Raffaella Lombardi grew up in rural southern Italy in, as she describes it, a simple, middle-class family. Her father’s family were farmers; her father himself a phone company technician; and her mother was an elementary school teacher. Lombardi loved to learn, read books, and play outdoors. Early in life—as a young undergraduate at the University of Naples Federico II—she discovered a passion for medical research, specifically for cardiology, and more specifically for cardiomyopathies. From then on, she has never wavered from that field of study, first gaining an MD, then a PhD, pursuing postdoctoral studies and, in 2008, winning the Louis N. and Arnold M. Katz Basic Research Prize to continue her work. In 2013, Lombardi was appointed as an assistant professor at the Center for Cardiovascular Genetics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. Raffaella Lombardi Lombardi’s unfaltering dedication to the study of how the heart functions and how it deteriorates during cardiomyopathy1–5 is all the more impressive given her confession to Circulation Research that she used to be terrified of blood. Actually no. I liked Physics. I was afraid of blood, so I never thought about being a medical doctor. After high school, I studied Physics at university, and I was there for one year, but I was not happy. It was too theoretical. One of my uncles—a cousin of my mother—was a gynecologist. I was in his clinic one day because a baby cousin of mine had just been born and we were visiting mother and baby, when my uncle asked if I would like to come with him into the surgery room—he was about to perform uterine surgery on another patient. I said, “Are you crazy? I am afraid of blood!” He …