Benjamin Byrd III, M.D., professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, has been named president of the 16,000-member American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) for a one-year term following the society’s 24th Annual Scientific Sessions, which were held earlier this month in Minneapolis.
Byrd will oversee efforts to improve the quality and consistency of cardiovascular ultrasound worldwide, including monitoring and reducing suboptimal echocardiograms, making echo study images transportable with patients, improving consistency across all labs and standardizing echo reporting.
Byrd is board-certified in Cardiovascular Disease and Internal Medicine, and he is a fellow of both the American College of Cardiology (FACC) and the American Society of Echocardiography (FASE). He is a well-known speaker on adult congenital heart disease and valvular disease topics.
Byrd graduated from Princeton University with a degree in history in 1973 and from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1977.
He completed his medical residency at Vanderbilt after one year as a resident in Psychiatry at Harvard University, and then performed a two-year cardiology fellowship at Vanderbilt before a spending a year in research in echocardiography at the University of California, San Francisco. He joined the Department of Medicine in Cardiology at Vanderbilt in 1984 as director of the Echocardiography Laboratory.
Byrd introduced transesophageal and stress echocardiography to Vanderbilt, and he was a co-founder of its Adult Congenital Heart Clinic, which he directed for more than a decade. He has been a professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University since 2002.
He has served as president of the Intersocietal Accreditation Commission for Echocardiography (IAC-Echocardiography), and as president of the American Heart Association Tennessee Affiliate.
He was chair of the ASE Membership Committee from 2003-2007 and chair of the ASE Advocacy Committee from 2007-2010. In 2009 he received the ASE Meritorious Service Award.
He served as the first president of the Friesinger Society at Vanderbilt, established to honor the longtime chief of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Gottlieb C. (Bud) Friesinger II, M.D.
