HealthManagement, Volume 15 - Issue 3, 2015



...one single thing escapes
fate: faith and wisdom

Dr. Geneviève Derumeaux is Professor and Head of the Department of Echocardiography, Louis Pradel University Hospital, Lyon, France, She pioneered tissue Doppler imaging and it is her goal to create a subspeciality of noninvasive imaging.

1. What are your key areas of interest and research?

I pioneered the assessment of the myocardial function using new techniques that have become part of the cardiac evaluation. Premature ageing is now my area of interest in the context of cardiometabolic disorders. I am now in a translational field, using echocardiography in ageing to tackle problems related to the nature of the heart.

2. What are the major challenges in your field?

The major challenge is to integrate new concepts into the clinical area. When you are working on a topic that is new, you need to prove that it is useful. Through my research, the concept of bio-diagnostics has to be translated into clinical practice.

3. What is your top management tip?

My tip is integrating people. Integrate people, while both trying to leave them specific space to develop their own career, and helping them cross-collaborate and cross-communicate.

4. What would you single out as a career highlight?

My current highlight is running my department, which integrates cardiologists, biologists, people working on cardiac disease and metabolic disorders. We develop a translational programme, aiming to provide the groundwork for tackling major ageing cardiac disease. As this goes beyond echocardiography and ageing, it needs all the integration of all other departments and results in this innovative translational research programme at my current university, Université Paris-Est Créteil.

5. If you had not chosen this career path what would you have become?

A pilot.

6. What are your personal interests outside work?

Reading, listening to opera music, horse riding, tennis and swimming.

7. Do you have a favourite quote?

“Wherever man will inevitably reach, and whatever happens to him, one single thing escapes fate: faith and wisdom” (Søren Kirkegaard).