Yoram Rudy, the M. Frank and Margaret C. Rudy Professor of Cardiac Bioelectricity; professor of biomedical engineering, physiology and biophysics, and medicine; and director of the Cardiac Bioelectricity Research and Training Center at Case Western Reserve University, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE.)

Also elected to the NAE this year is Paul Citron, vice president of corporate science and technology at Medtronic Inc. in Minneapolis, Minn., who is a member of the Case School of Engineering's Biomedical Engineering Industrial Development Advisory Board.

Rudy was elected with the citation: "For leadership in the engineering sciences of cardiac excitation at the genetic and molecular levels and for introducing new methods in clinical diagnosis and therapy."

Election to the academy is one of the highest professional honors for an engineer. Rudy is one of two engineers elected from Ohio, and the only biomedical engineer elected this year. He will be inducted into the academy in October at the NAE's annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Rudy has spent the last two decades exploring the electrical activity of the heart and learning about abnormal heart rhythms. He believes that understanding the mechanisms for abnormal heart rhythms could save lives through better diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias.

About 400,000 Americans die each year from rhythm disorders of the heart, commonly known as cardiac arrhythmias. Rudy uses theoretical techniques such as mathematical modeling and computer simulations combined with experimental and clinical data to discover why cardiac rhythm disorders occur, where they originate and how to prevent and treat them. He said work is complex because abnormal rhythms can begin at the molecular and cellular levels and involve the complex structure of the multicellular tissue and entire heart.

"The electrical activity of the heart is the signal that tells the heart to contract and allows the heart to pump blood in a synchronous manner," Rudy said. "Normally, the heart's natural pacemaker produces electrical impulses that spread throughout the heart as a wave of electrical excitation that travels in a precisely defined path repeated during every heartbeat. However, during cardiac arrhythmia this synchronization may break down, generating fast and irregular heartbeats. In some cases, the rhythm becomes chaotic, leading to sudden cardiac death."

A major thrust of Rudy's work is the development of mathematical models of cardiac cells and tissue. He and his graduate students use these "virtual cells" to link genetic information to arrhythmic cellular behavior using computational biology approaches, trying to explain the mechanisms of hereditary rhythm disorders and sudden death.

Another focus of Rudy's research is the development of a noninvasive imaging modality called Electrocardiographic Imaging (ECGI) for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. This approach is the equivalent of computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for cardiac rhythm disorders. It is designed to diagnose cardiac arrhythmias, identify patients at risk of sudden death and to guide and evaluate therapy. The research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health's - National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute through research grants and a MERIT Award.

Rudy received both his bachelor of science degree and master of science degree in physics from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and his doctorate in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University. He serves as director of the Cardiac Bioelectricity Research and Training Center at CWRU, which brings together biophysicists, physiologists, biomedical engineers, cardiologists, radiologists and surgeons in an interdisciplinary effort to address issues relating to the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and their diagnosis.

Rudy is a Fellow of the American Physiological Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Recently, he received the Biomedical Engineering Society Distinguished Lectureship Award and the Ueda Memorial Award from the Japanese Society of Electrocardiology. He lives in Shaker Heights.