I am a consultant cardiologist and physician-scientist at the Heart Failure and Transplant Unit of Hospital Universitario Reina Sofía (Córdoba, Spain). My research sits at the interface between clinical cardiology and trial methodology, and is supported by a competitive Juan Rodés contract from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), co-funded by the European Union.

I am an Emerging Investigator at the Maimónides Biomedical Research Institute of Córdoba (IMIBIC), within the consolidated cardiovascular group GC-15, an affiliated investigator of the CIBERCV network, and a visiting investigator at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) through the European COMPASS project (Innovative Health Initiative, Horizon Europe).

Research focus

My work is clinical rather than basic, and combines randomised clinical trials with real-world evidence, always with the aim of improving patient-centred outcomes. My main areas of interest are the most prevalent cardiovascular conditions, particularly heart failure and ischaemic heart disease, together with cardio-oncology and the study of vulnerable populations exposed to the cardiotoxic effects of cancer therapies. More recently I have developed a line of clinical-trial methodology, including the use of healthcare-systems data to design more efficient trials and the application of estimands such as the win ratio to composite endpoints.

Training

I hold a PhD in Biomedicine from the Universidad de Córdoba (2022) and an MSc in Statistics for Clinical Trials from University College London (UCL), awarded with Distinction. My UCL research project, carried out during an ISCIII-funded mobility stay at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL, validated a computational algorithm for the identification of myocardial infarction in healthcare-systems data. I maintain an active methodological collaboration with the unit.

I am author or co-author of more than 75 peer-reviewed publications, several of them as principal (first or corresponding) author and a number in top-decile (D1) journals. A full list is available on the Publications page.

Service and teaching

I serve as Statistical Editor of JACC: Advances and I am a board member of the Young Cardiologists Group of the Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC). Alongside my clinical and research activity, I supervise doctoral theses and undergraduate dissertations and teach within the Degree in Medicine at the Universidad de Córdoba. Details are on the Teaching and CV pages.

Contact

Academic correspondence: rafael.gonzalez@imibic.org. ORCID: 0000-0001-8446-7369.