Ajar Kochar, MD, MHS

2018-2019 Fellow Talk Blogger

Ajar is an interventional cardiology fellow at Duke University (Durham, NC), where he also trained in cardiovascular medicine, earned his master of health sciences, and completed a clinical research fellowship. He attended Alpert Medical School at Brown University (Providence, RI) and completed his internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore, MD). His research interests have focused around the intersection between cardiac intervention and critical care. Most recently, he has been seeking to understand the cause of the high mortality associated with cardiogenic shock, and Ajar was awarded a Duke Institution for Health Innovation grant to develop a machine learning-based model that will identify patients with cardiogenic shock and predict cardiac decompensation. He says that the most challenging part of his journey to becoming an interventional cardiologist has been “balancing a growing family, with two young children, and the desire to learn more, read more, and write more. Despite the difficulty of managing multiple responsibilities, the limited time continues to push me to become more efficient and thoughtful with my time management.”  You can follow him on Twitter @Ajar_Kochar.