Dr. Stu Seides Selected to Receive 2010 Alumni Fellow Award
Dr. Stuart Seides got off to a fast start and he hasn’t slowed since. An Eagle Scout at age 13, he entered Penn State as a pre-med major at 16 and was selected as a General Motors Academic Scholar. After only three years, Cornell University Medical College accepted the 19-year-old Evan Pugh Scholar. Penn State counted his first year of medical school as his fourth year toward his bachelor’s degree. Seides went on to graduate at the top of his medical school class and moved to Boston to start his residency at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital. He was 23.
Though he flirted with specializing in infectious diseases, he fell for the burgeoning field of cardiology because it combined his love of the mechanical and intellectual. Seides could see the field was poised to take off. “The world’s greatest cardiologist in 1970 would be totally lost today with the changes in the field,” he notes. Following postgraduate work with the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institute of Health, Seides founded Cardiology Associates in 1979. The independent group practice that Seides describes as “a heart institute without walls” is the largest in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, with 25 physicians in five offices. Since opening, they’ve cared for more than 100,000 patients.
Seides still spends a majority of his time seeing patients. That’s in addition to attending staff and faculty clinical appointments at both Georgetown and George Washington Universities, and serving as senior attending physician in the Cardiac Catheterization Lab and associate director of cardiology at the Washington Hospital Center. Seides was the first doctor to perform coronary angioplasty (then in the early stages of being adapted from techniques developed in Europe) at the Washington Hospital Center, now the largest center for that procedure in the United States.
Seides’ peers elected him president of the 2,500-member D.C. Medical Society in 2000 and Washingtonian magazine has consistently named him one of the area’s top physicians. In 2001, Mayor Anthony Williams appointed him to the District of Columbia Health Services Reform Commission. Seides has written more than 40 articles and abstracts and in 1979 he co-authored Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology, considered one of the seminal texts in this rapidly developing field.
In recent years, Seides has developed a sideline as a commentator on medical matters for national media outlets. He’s been interviewed by morning news shows, CNN, NPR, and national newspapers such as The New York Times. He explains how you become an expert commentator: “When the phone rings at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday evening and someone says, ‘Vice President Dick Cheney just had a heart attack. Can you come down to the CNN studio in 20 minutes?’ you say, ‘yes.’” Seides sees it as another form of education. “I like teaching,” he says, “Whether it’s students at GW Med School, a patient I’m treating, or explaining to the public how Cheney’s defibrillator works.”
Seides has served as a member of the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society’s board of directors and remains grateful to the university that both he and his late father, Arthur Seides ’41 Eng, attended. “Not many schools were interested in a 16-year-old,” he says. “Penn State was.”