Roger Hajjar, MD

President, Chief Medical Officer, and co-Founder 

Dr. Roger Hajjar has served as Chief Medical Officer of Medera since September 2020. He is a co-founder of Sardocor, Medera’s arm for clinical development of novel therapies. Dr. Hajjar is an internationally renowned scientific leader in the field of cardiac gene therapy. His academic laboratory had validated a number of cardiac targets, including the cardiac sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase (SERCA2a) that led to the initiation and completion under his guidance of First-in-Human gene therapy trials in patients with heart failure and cardiomyopathies. He has been appointed as the Inaugural Director of the Gene and Cell Therapy Institute at Mass General Brigham. Dr. Hajjar has authored over 500 publications and has received numerous awards and accolades over his career, including Young Investigator Award of the American Heart Association, Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Award of AstraZeneca, Distinguished Alumnus Award from Johns Hopkins University, American Heart Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and Thomas W. Smith Award from the American Heart Association.

Dr. Hajjar obtained a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University and a M.D. from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology.