SMA/ASH Faculty for SMA’s 2018 Annual Meeting: William Cushman, MD

September 5, 2018 // Randy Glick

William C. Cushman, MD

Dr. William Cushman is Chief of the Preventive Medicine Section at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center and Professor of Preventive Medicine, Medicine, and Physiology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, Tennessee.  Dr. Cushman graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Medicine in 1974, where he completed his residency training in 1977. He served on the faculty at the University of Mississippi and was on the staff at the VA, both in Jackson, MS, from 1977-1988, when he moved to the University of Tennessee and VA in Memphis, TN.

He was a member of the 2004 and the VA champion for the 2014 VA-Department of Defense Hypertension Clinical Practice Guideline committees, and was on the JNC 7 and JNC 8 U.S. hypertension guideline committees.  Dr. Cushman has been an investigator and on the leadership for many clinical trials in hypertension, diabetes, and lipid therapy, including a number of VA Cooperative Studies, and the NHLBI trials ALLHAT, ACCORD, and SPRINT.  He is currently co-chair of the Diuretic Comparison Project, a VA Cooperative Study, which compares the effect of the thiazide-type diuretics chlorthalidone and hydrochlorothiazide on major cardiovascular outcomes.

Dr. Cushman has received more than $60 million in research grant funding, has more than 285 journal article and book chapter publications, and has received several awards, including the 2010 Barnwell Award, the VA Clinical Science Research and Development’s highest honor for clinical science achievement, the 2017 Inter-American Society of Hypertension Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2018 American Heart Association’s Council on Hypertension Irvine Page-Alva Bradley Lifetime Achievement Award.

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