White House chooses Fox

Dr. Ervin Fox, a University of Mississippi Medical Center professor of cardiology and Jackson Heart Study researcher, has received a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Fox, a University of Mississippi School of Medicine graduate and an 11-year member of the UMMC faculty, was selected for his research into how cardiovascular and vascular structures and their functions relate to disease outcomes, particularly heart disease in African-Americans.

Fox earned a bachelor’s in biomedical engineering in 1989 from Mississippi State University and graduated from the School of Medicine in 1993. He completed an internal medicine residency at Washington University Medical Center, a general cardiology fellowship at Tulane Medical Center and a fellowship in clinical and research in echo-cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He since earned a master’s in public health from Harvard University.

In his research, Fox, a Clarksdale native, has used data collected from local African-American population-study groups in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, Genetic Epidemiology Network of Atherosclerosis (GENOA) and Jackson Heart Study.