It is my great honor to serve this wonderful community as your 76th president.

I would like to start by congratulating all of you who are receiving your FACC and AACC designations today.

Unfortunately, I missed out on this experience over three decades ago. Due to clinical responsibilities, I was unable to attend that year's ACC Scientific Session and instead received my FACC diploma in the mail.

There's nothing quite like experiencing this moment in person, and I'm thrilled that you're here today to celebrate this important achievement alongside your family, friends and peers.

I would like to start with a story of the first experience that captured my imagination and led me towards a career in medicine. I was 5 or 6 years old when the movie the Fantastic Voyage came out.

I remember being enthralled with the sci-fi approach to miniaturizing a spaceship with scientists and physicians on board and injecting it into the bloodstream to treat a patient who had suffered a stroke – so innovative for its time.

I can still visualize the spaceship being attacked by leukocytes and the ensuing battle for survival. Being able to visualize the inner workings of the human body was part of the inspiration so many years later to take up a career in cardiovascular imaging.

Today I want to talk to you about two Fantastic Voyage-Related themes: innovation and mentorship.

Why innovation?

Well, it underlies all we do in the field of cardiovascular medicine today. The "Fantastic Voyage" is ongoing.

Look how far the field has changed in a few short decades. When I was a resident, all we had to treat a patient with a STEMI was oxygen, sedation and bed rest. Now we rush the patient to the cath lab, perform primary PCI and stenting, and the patient goes home on five medications.

Because of this amazing transformation of care, mortality from an acute MI has accordingly fallen dramatically. And who knows what the field will be like three decades from now when you are approaching the latter stages of your career!

Just imagine. Perhaps you get a notice on your smart earpiece that there is a patient in your hospital's jurisdiction suffering from a STEMI. You're at home in your pajamas, and you send a text to the robot in the cath lab to expect the patient shortly via hovercraft. You use your virtual reality glasses as you sit in front of your computer in your study to guide the robot through the primary PCI.

How about the amazing innovation in heart failure? The VALHEFT study was published when I was a medical resident. It was the first study to help support the neurohormonal hypothesis and, soon after, ACE inhibitors became a standard of care.

Now, we have four classes of medications that make up guideline-directed medical therapy for HFrEF, and mortality and morbidity continue to decline. And just in the last couple of years, we have three classes of medications with new indications for HFpEF.

Imagine treating a patient with new onset heart failure in 2055, and you can use your hand-held MRI to quantify the ejection fraction and measure the location and amount of scar without a contrast agent.

Innovation drives our field.

My next "Fantastic Voyage" moment: I remember being in the audience as a chief medical resident at Penn when Dr. Nat Reichek gave grand rounds on cardiac MRI. I saw the images and said to myself "I want to do that!"

When I started doing cardiac MRI research as a fellow, it really wasn't a field yet. The studies took too long to perform safely in a sick patient, and so we had to study large animals. We would start a scan, go get dinner, come back, find out that the images were terrible, start it over again and go get dessert. It wasn't clinically viable.

Now, the studies continue to get faster and more efficient. We can safely image patients with implantable devices and even do stress testing in them with excellent image quality. It is an exciting time in cardiovascular medicine! You are starting your own "Fantastic Voyages" at a time where you are uniquely positioned to take advantage of new advances in AI and other technologies, with even more to come in the very near and exciting future. You may be the one that comes up with the newest way of improving care.

Shifting gears to my second topic: mentorship.

I encourage you all to cherish your mentors and continuously work on becoming outstanding mentors yourselves. The award I am most gratified by in my career is the 2021 ACC Mentor of the Year. Why? I am so proud of the many former trainees who are directing or participating in imaging programs around the country, including five, soon to be six, former imaging trainees on faculty at UVA.

This is what it's all about for me: growing future generations of cardiovascular clinicians, seeing people that I've mentored and trained mentoring and training others. I call these newest trainees my "grandkids."

We all have examples of outstanding mentors who have helped to shape our personal and professional careers. For me, George Beller was a tremendous mentor, the best one could be. He believed in me. He pushed me forward. He promoted me. He was warm, kind and a true gentleman.

His support validated my successes in my career. He saw something in me that I did not necessarily see in myself. I stand here today because he pushed me to put my hat in the ring for the ACC Board more than 10 years ago. I couldn't be prouder to hold the title of the George A. Beller, MD, Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine at UVA.

We also likely have had mentors who have showed us examples of what not to be as a leader or clinician. I remember one mentor who, while incredibly committed to the field of CV medicine, was not a good example of physician wellness. He was a workaholic with few interests or hobbies outside of medicine. While he had the clinical smarts to be a leader in cardiology, his nonclinical leadership qualities like teamwork, collaboration and communication were lacking.

It's important to be mindful of your role models and mentors and learn from both positive and negative experiences. One of the best ways to honor your good mentors is by taking the time to be a strong positive mentor to those coming up behind you.

So, where will this "Fantastic Voyage" lead us next? Where do we need to go as a field of cardiovascular medicine?

Health equity is one key area of focus and one that is at the core of ACC's current five-year Strategic Plan. Equitable health care for all must be a goal in our practices each and every day.

We must also help drive down costs of health care, create access for those who have had difficulty accessing the medical system, tackle the epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and harness the power of AI to improve equity and access as well as improve the utility of the EHR with the goal of reducing physician burnout.

These are all tall tasks that will require each one of us to not throw up our hands in exasperation but rather work hard to chip away at the problems and find tangible solutions. We must do our best to work within the confines of global and local politics to achieve these goals and advocate for our patients and our profession.

Together we can make real differences in the lives of our patients, as well as in our own lives as caregivers.

In closing, let me leave you with a few words of advice as you embark on your own "Fantastic Voyage" over the next year and beyond.

First, be resilient! The voyage will not be a straight and narrow road. There will always be roadblocks. I, for one, have had major challenges to overcome at each institution I have called home.

Be open to alternative paths. This resilience is especially necessary at this time of uncertainty regarding the goings-on in Washington. We need to keep an even keel, not overreact to the daily news.

Second, take risks and go beyond what you think you are capable of. Choosing a career path in cardiac MR was a huge risk academically for me at the start but has since brought great reward.

Third, be open to change and always think about the next way to innovate.

And lastly, enjoy the ride. CV medicine is a great career, and you are, and will be, improving and lengthening the lives of many.

Before I close, I would like to thank everyone who had a hand in supporting me and getting me to the point of speaking in front of you today.

First and foremost, my family, who have been a source of great inspiration and support and have had to make sacrifices given my schedule and time away, especially my wife Cathy. She and I met in 1982 when she asked me to be her cadaver partner in anatomy lab at the very start of the first year of medical school. The rest is history.

Thanks also to my sons, Alex and Zach, and daughter-in-law, Naomi, my brothers, Dan, Andrew and Glad, and their families, my late parents, John and Debbie, who were inspirational in different ways, my twin aunts, Penny and Pam, and mother-in-law, Millie.

I would like to thank the faculty of the UVA Cardiovascular Division for their support and having my back during this busy time. Thanks to Mike Valentine, another great mentor and past ACC president from UVA, as well as Todd Villines, Angela Taylor and Rohit Malhotra. I also want to recognize ACC mentors and leaders Pat O'Gara, Dipti Itchhaporia, Rick Chazal, Minnow Walsh, Ed Fry, Hadley Wilson, Bill Zoghbi, Roxana Mehran, cousin Thad Waites, and of course, the indomitable Cathie Biga.

Thanks as well to all of you! I look forward to the "Fantastic Voyage" of this next year and beyond!

Keywords: ACC25, ACC Annual Scientific Session