Dr. Hee Cheol Cho is the Urowsky-Sahr Scholar in Pediatric Bioengineering and an associate professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Pediatrics at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Cho is a stem cell and cardiology researcher who is part of Emory-Children’s Pediatric Research Center and the Wallace H. Counter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. He conducts research within the joint institutions’ Heart Regeneration Lab, which focuses on using genes and chemicals to pace and regenerate the heart. 

In 2019, Dr. Cho’s research was jointly funded by The Children’s Heart Foundation and the American Heart Association.

Before his work in Atlanta, Dr. Cho was at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he specialized in understanding cardiac pacemaker cells, a small group of muscle cells in the sinoatrial node of the heart that initiate cardiac contraction. 

Millions of Americans have received electronic cardiac pacemakers to alleviate arrhythmias. Cho and others envision the possibility that “biological pacemakers” would have advantages in terms of better responding to the body’s demands of exercise or stress, and being more flexible in size with pediatric patients.

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