David C. Goff

David C. Goff, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., is the Deputy Director for Precision Medicine and Data Science, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health. In this role, Dr. Goff is responsible for advancing the Institute's mission and vision for harnessing cutting-edge data science approaches to drive precision prevention, detection, and treatment of heart, lung, blood, and sleep conditions to improve community health and patient care outcomes.  In this role, he serves as NHLBI's executive sponsor for the TransOmics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program and the BioData Catalyst program, NHLBI's cloud-based data science ecosystem. He also serves as a Senior Scientific Program Director for RECOVER, NIH's Long COVID program.

From 2016 to 2024, Dr. Goff was the Director, Division of Cardiovascular Sciences (DCVS) at the NHLBI. During this time, he led a diverse team of scientists and administrators committed to turning discovery into cardiovascular health. He led development of a new Strategic Vision Implementation Plan for DCVS that led to the launch of several new strategic initiatives including HeartShare and the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® (AMP®) for Heart Failure, efforts to deeply phenotype and deconstruct the syndrome of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction to set the stage for precision trials. He also led the launch of the ENRICH initiative designed to test an approach to enhance the cardiovascular health of pregnant women and their offspring, and two new observational cohort studies focused on the health of rural Americans and Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. He received the American Heart Association Award of Meritorious Achievement in 2017. He received NIH Director’s Awards in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 for contributions to the NIH response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, efforts to reduce the burden of heart failure, and efforts to nurture population science across communities.

Prior to joining the NHLBI, he served as Dean and Professor of Epidemiology in the Colorado School of Public Health and as Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Prevention at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. He received an MD from the University of North Carolina and a PhD in epidemiology from the University of Texas-Houston School of Public Health. He trained in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He is an elected member of the American Epidemiological Society, and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American Heart Association. His research interests include the epidemiology and prevention of heart disease and stroke with a focus on issues related to high blood pressure, diabetes, and dyslipidemia. He has published over 350 manuscripts, book chapters, and other scientific reports.