Roger Winkle, MD

Silicon Valley Cardiology, Palo Alto, CA

Dr. Roger Winkle obtained a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and attended the University of Cincinnati Medical School. He did internship and residency at Washington University and Barnes Hospital and went to Stanford University for cardiology training. His early research interests included ambulatory ECG monitoring, arrhythmias in obstructive sleep apnea and the clinical pharmacology of antiarrhythmic drugs. At Stanford he became a tenured faculty member and cofounded one of the first academic arrhythmia services. In 1984 he founded Silicon Valley Cardiology, one of the first private EP groups in the US. He helped develop the modern ICD, was involved in the open-heart surgical mapping of almost 1000 cases of VT, WPW, and AVNRT and has performed thousands of RF ablations. He described proarrhythmia from Type 1C antiarrhythmic drugs and introduced catheter based human defibrillation with a biphasic waveform. He began his ablation research with high energy DC ablation and helped develop one of the first steerable RF ablation catheter systems. His current research interests include evaluating procedural techniques for and the outcomes of atrial fibrillation RF ablation and the use of ultra high-density mapping for atrial arrhythmias.