Dr. Rao is Professor of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Deputy Director of the Leon H. Charney Division of Cardiology, and the Director of Interventional Cardiology for the NYU Langone Health System. He graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Oxford, OH, and magna cum laude from The Ohio State University College of Medicine where he won the David Saylor Memorial Award for Cardiology Research. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine and fellowships in Cardiology and Interventional Cardiology at Duke University Medical Center. He served as Chief Fellow at The Duke Clinical Research Institute and was the Warren and Gloria A. Newman Fellow in Interventional Cardiology. After his training, he joined the faculty at Duke University Medical Center as an Assistant Professor of Medicine and rose to become Professor of Medicine in 2017. In 2005, he became the Director of the Catheterization Laboratories at the Durham VA Medical Center, and in 2014, he was appointed Chief of Cardiology at the Durham VA. 

As the Chief of Cardiology at the Durham VA, Dr. Rao was selected for and completed the Duke Chancellor’s Leadership Training Program (C-CHAMP). His initiatives at the VA expanded patient access, established new clinical programs, improved the quality of care, and increased research funding from the NIH, the Department of Defense, and VA HSR&D across basic, translational, and clinical research domains. 

He was the 2022-2023 President of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI), the international professional society for interventional cardiologists. His Presidency was the most productive in SCAI’s history as he led the development of an official interventional cardiology fellowship “match” process, established the SCAI Early Career Research Grant program, and increased diversity across SCAI committees and leadership.

In 2022, he was recruited to be the Director of Interventional Cardiology for the NYU Langone Health System. As Director of Interventional Cardiology for the NYU Langone Health System, Dr. Rao increased procedural volume, substantially improved quality metrics, improved cath lab efficiency and room utilization, and expanded research. 

Dr. Rao has published over 400 peer-reviewed manuscripts. His main research interests are antithrombotic therapies for ACS and PCI, and novel interventional therapies for ischemic heart disease. Dr. Rao has been the Principal Investigator of several randomized clinical trials including the first registry-based randomized trial performed in the United States titled the “SAFE-PCI for Women” trial comparing radial and femoral approaches to PCI in women.  He is the Principal Investigator for the NHLBI-funded PE-TRACT Trial comparing catheter-directed therapy with medical therapy for intermediate-risk pulmonary thromboembolism. He has won several awards including the W. Proctor Harvey Award from The American College of Cardiology (2011), and the Duke Cardiology Fellows’ Mentoring Award (2013, 2018), and The Duke Clinical Research Institute Robert M. Califf MD Award for Fellow Mentoring (2020). 

At the national level, Dr. Rao serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Circulation Cardiovascular Interventions, the interventional journal of the American Heart Association’s flagship Circulation family of journals, and is Co-Editor-In-Chief of the ACC Collaborative Management Pathway for board certification.