Dr. Gardner is past president of the American Heart Association (AHA). As president during the 2008-09 fiscal years, Dr. Gardner served as the AHA’s chief volunteer science and medical officer, responsible for medical, scientific and public health matters. He is a member of several AHA Advisory Boards and Committees and National Board of Directors and has been an AHA volunteer for more than 25 years.

From 1999 to 2002, he served as a councilor, vice president, then president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. He was a director of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery for 10 years and served as the board’s chair and vice chair from 2001 to 2005. Dr. Gardner also served as an IPA Medical Officer in the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at National Institutes of Health from 2004 to 2007. Currently, he serves as steering committee chair for the Cardiothoracic Surgery Clinical Trials Network sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Dr. Gardner was the William M. Measey Professor of Surgery and chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery for the University of Pennsylvania Health System from 1993 to 2003. Currently, he is professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Dr. Gardner was a cardiac surgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore from 1976-1993. He joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1976, was appointed professor of surgery in 1986 and mentored numerous surgery residents and research fellows at Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania between 1976 and 2004.

He has lectured extensively both nationally and abroad and he is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and has edited or contributed to many texts on cardiac surgery. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Medical School and received his postgraduate training in surgery at Johns Hopkins, with a final period of training in cardiac surgery in Auckland, New Zealand. He was a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, serving in the U.S. Army Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, from 1968 to 1970.