March 2010 issue, but it was an Iranian cardiologist who was plucked from all of them and featured on the magazine’s cover.
Born in Iran, Merdod Ghafouri came to the United States in 1980 to study at the University of Texas. He is one of seven siblings, all of whom have advanced degrees. Three of his brothers are physicians and one of his sisters is a pharmacist.
“Service to society was highly regarded in my family,” he says. “My mother was our driving force.”
Ghafouri practices in Northern Virginia and says he enjoys the intellectual challenges involved in cardiology, which requires analyzing data from multiple sources to make diagnoses.
When asked about health-care reform, Ghafouri said Medicare and private insurances should pay for screening and preventive evaluations for the most common type of heart disease.
“We cover colonoscopy at age 50, mammography at age 40,” he says, “but we have decided that we’re not going to screen for coronary-artery disease even though it’s the most common cause of hospitalization and death.”
