Catherine Otto is the J. Ward Kennedy-Hamilton Endowed Chair in Cardiology, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Heart Valve Clinic at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Otto is recognized as an expert on calcific aortic valve disease. Dr. Otto's research has transformed our understanding of this disease process, showing that it is an active disease process that may be amenable to medical therapy, rather than being an inevitable consequence of aging. Her research on the aortic valve includes validation of noninvasive measures of disease severity, the first prospective study of disease progression, immunohistologic studies establishing the cellular and molecular mechanisms of valve disease, epidemiologic studies defining the clinical risk factors associated with calcific valve disease and a landmark study demonstrating that even mild valve thickening, called aortic sclerosis, is associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes. In addition, Dr. Otto is the author of several cardiology books: The Textbook of Clinical Echocardiography (5th Edition), The Practice of Clinical Echocardiography (4rd Edition), Valvular Heart Disease (4rd Edition, co-edited by Robert O. Bonow, MD), Atlas of Intraoperative Echocardiography (with Don Oxorn) and the Echocardiography Review Guide ( 2nd Edition with Rosario Freeman and Becky Schwaegler). She is a Cardiology Editor-in-Chief for the online medical textbook Up-to-Date and is the Editor in Chief of the journal Heart, published by BMJ and the British Cardiovascular Society. For more information, visit http://elsevierauthors.com/catherineotto/