Our Board of Directors
Dr. Mario Deng
Professor Mario Deng, M.D., is a cardiologist, specialized in the care of patients with advanced heart failure, mechanical circulatory support devices and heart transplantation. After medical training in Germany and a postdoctoral cardiology research fellowship at Stanford University, he served as the Medical Director of the Interdisciplinary Heart Failure & Heart Transplantation Program at Muenster University (1992-2000), Director of Cardiac Transplantation Research at Columbia University (2000-2011), and between 2011 and 2016, Medical Director of the UCLA Integrated Advanced Heart Failure/Mechanical Support/Heart Transplant program.
Prof. Deng maintains a position at the intersection between clinical cardiology, teaching and translational research. Dr. Deng is Co-Principal Investigator of the Cardiac Allograft Rejection Gene Expression Observational (CARGO) study that led to the first-in-history US-FDA-cleared genomic organ transplantation rejection AllomapTM blood test and Principal Investigator of the NIH-NHLBI-project “Multidimensional Molecular Biomarkers of MultiOrgan Dysfunction after Mechanical Circulatory Support Therapy.”
Together with Prof. Federica Raia, he developed the Relational Medicine Theory with the core concept of the RelationalAct to improve the understanding and practice of modern medicine. In the context of this work, Prof. Deng is the co-founder and co-president, with Prof. Raia, of the Relational Medicine Foundation, a non-profit organization in support of the on-going collaboration among different stakeholders: patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, education researchers and artists/theater professionals to improve the understanding and practice of high-tech modern medicine
Federica Raia
Federica Raia is the co-founder of the foundation and faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles https://seis.ucla.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-directory/federica-raia
Victoria Groysberg
Victoria Groysberg graduated UCLA in 2014 and has been working in a lab ever since. Always sketching and painting growing up, Victoria gained a love of art at a young age and took art classes for 10 years. Through witnessing the suffering brought upon by heart disease on her grandparents and her art teacher of 10 years, she realized that introducing art therapy into the medical environment had great potential to benefit patient's recoveries. Through her exposure to the medical environment, she realized that the biomedical approach was not enough, and that a mechanism to build up patient's optimism and spirituality during their stay in the hospital needed to be introduced. This mechanism is the use of Relational Medicine and the use of the arts to assist patients in the healing process. She aims to go to medical school and to incorporate these fundamental principles into her practice.