Welcome, New Faculty!

Dr. Justin McNair Canada

Justin McNair Canada, RCEP, Ph.D., has been named an assistant professor of internal medicine in the Division of Cardiology. He is spearheading the development and optimization of advanced clinical exercise testing services for both research and clinical use. He also serves as senior clinical exercise physiologist for the Department of Occupational and Physical Therapy at VCU Medical Center, and adjunct faculty instructor for the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences’ Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences.

He received his master’s in health and movement sciences, with a concentration in exercise physiology, and a doctoral degree in rehabilitation and movement sciences, also with a concentration in exercise physiology, from VCU. His doctoral dissertation examined the use of exercise testing to identify heart abnormalities in cancer survivors who had previously undergone radiotherapy treatments.

Canada recently received a pilot grant from the VCU Department of Internal Medicine to explore the feasibility of coupling cardiopulmonary exercise testing with cardiac MRI to precisely identify the causes of exercise intolerance in cancer patients following anti-cancer therapies. Participants of the study will exercise on a supine bicycle ergometer while undergoing a cardiac MRI to obtain real-time images of heart function during exercise. He is also co-investigator on NIH and numerous other grants with Drs. Antonio Abbate, Benjamin Van Tassell and other faculty evaluating the efficacy of therapeutic treatments in patients with cardiovascular disease.

Canada recently received a pilot grant from the VCU Department of Internal Medicine to explore the feasibility of coupling cardiopulmonary exercise testing with cardiac MRI to precisely identify the causes of exercise intolerance in cancer patients following anti-cancer therapies.

Jennifer Hawthorne Jordan, Ph.D., M.S., has joined the faculty as director of the new Cardiovascular MRI Core Lab and assistant professor of biomedical engineering. Her previous position was engineering director of the Cardiovascular MRI Laboratory at Wake Forest School of Medicine, where she also served on the faculty.

She received her master’s in clinical and population translational sciences at Wake Forest University and her doctoral degree in biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. She also completed a T32 cardiovascular imaging postdoctoral fellowship. One of her research advisors at Wake Forest was Dr. Greg Hundley.

Jordan is a peer reviewer for numerous journals and currently serves as an investigator on over $13 million in NIH and other grants, mostly involving MRI studies of patients with cardiovascular disease, including those who have undergone cancer treatments.

Dr. M. Khalid Mojadidi

M. Khalid Mojadidi, M.D., FACP, has joined the faculty as assistant professor of internal medicine. Mojadidi is an invasive cardiologist who will see patients at VCU Health Community Memorial Hospital in South Hill, Va.

He received his medical degree from the Shifa College of Medicine in Islamabad, Pakistan, during which time he served an internship with the World Health Organization in Kabul, Afghanistan. He later completed his cardiology fellowship at UCLA, his Internal Medicine residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Jacobi Medical Center and his cardiovascular disease fellowship at the University of Florida/Shands Hospital.

His areas of practice include cardiovascular disease, echocardiography (including transesophageal), nuclear cardiology, cardiac catheterization, cardioversion, ambulatory ECG monitoring and stress testing. He is board certified in internal medicine and echocardiography, and board eligible for cardiovascular disease, nuclear cardiology, cardiac CT and RPVI.

Mojadidi is widely published in peer review journals and serves as a reviewer for numerous publications. He is fluent in English, Farsi, Hindi and Urdu, with intermediate proficiency in Arabic.

John S. Wilson, M.D., Ph.D., has joined as primary investigator of the Cardiovascular Mechanics and Imaging Lab and assistant professor of the Division of Cardiology and the VCU College of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

After receiving his undergraduate degree in engineering at Baylor University, where he was the highest-ranking graduate of Baylor’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, he earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, completed an internal medicine internship at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas and completed his residency in radiology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

He then went on to attain his master’s, postgraduate and doctorate in biomedical engineering from Yale University, afterwards completing a post-doctoral fellowship in MRI-based approaches to quantifying regional vascular strain and remodeling in the departments of Radiology and Cardiology at Emory University.

Along with Drs. Jordan and Canada, he will help Pauley develop new technologies for identifying cardiovascular disease.

ABOVE: DR. JUSTIN MCNAIR CANADA AND DR. M. KHALID MOJADIDI