Filippo Crea was born in Cosenza, Italy on 19 September 1953. He graduated from Pisa Medical School with full honours in 1977 and passed the Postgraduate Boards in both Pulmonary and Cardiovascular Diseases, again with full honours, at Pisa Medical School in 1980 and 1983 respectively. During the whole of 1984 he was Research Fellow at the Division of Cardiology of the University of Florida, directed by Professor Richard C. Conti. From 1985 to 1991 he was Honorary Clinical Assistant and then Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant at the Cardiovascular Research Unit of the Hammersmith Hospital in London, directed by Professor Attilio Maseri. He returned to Italy upon his appointment as Chief of the Catheterization Laboratory at the Institute of Cardiology of the Catholic University in Rome. In 2000 he became Associate Professor of Cardiology and Chief of the Intensive and Sub-Intensive Care Units. In 2001 he became Professor of Cardiology, Director of the Institute of Cardiology and Director of the Postgraduate School in Cardiology at the Catholic University in Rome. Since October 2008 he has been Director of the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences.
He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and of the European Society of Cardiology, Past Chairman of the Working Group on “Coronary Pathophysiology and Microcirculation” and Past Member of the Congress Programme Committee of the European Society of Cardiology.
He is Associate Editor of the “European Heart Journal”, member of the Editorial Board of “Circulation”, “Clinical Cardiology” and “Revista Espagñola de Cardiologia”, past Associate Editor of “Heart” and past Deputy Editor of the “Italian Heart Journal”.
In 1992 he received the Newburg Prize for his scientific contribution to cardiovascular research from Professor Rita Levi Montalcini.
His main fields of interest are coronary microvascular dysfunction, mechanisms of acute coronary syndromes and pathophysiology of stem cells in coronary artery disease.
He is the author of more than 650 publications in peer-reviewed journals with an impact factor of more than 3900 and H-Index of 60. He has contributed to several multi-author textbooks. In particular, he is the author of the Chapter on Chronic Ischaemic Heart Disease of the ESC Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine published in 2009 and author of a book entitled Coronary Microvascular Dysfunction (in press).