Member Spotlight: Kevin C. Maki, PhD, CLS, FNLA

Dr. Kevin Maki was interested in studying heart disease and diabetes from an early age. Seeing his father and father’s siblings suffer from cardiovascular disease influenced him to begin researching the causes of heart disease while he was still in high school. He quickly became convinced that it was preventable. This was supported during Dr. Maki’s college years when the results from the Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial (LRC- CPPT) were published and confirmed that lowering cholesterol would reduce the risk of heart disease. These findings have influenced his entire career and inspired him to focus on researching how lifestyle affects risk factors for heart disease.

Dr. Maki is the chief scientist for a group of three research centers. Two of these research centers, the Midwest Center for Metabolic & Cardiovascular Research and the Great Lakes Clinical Trials, are in located in Chicago where Dr. Maki is based. MB Clinical Research, the third and newest center, opened in March 2015 in Boca Raton, Fla. MB Clinical Research came to fruition after the 2014 AHA Scientific Sessions in Chicago when Dr. Seth Baum, a Florida-based preventive cardiologist and fellow National Lipid Association (NLA) member, approached Dr. Maki about partnering to open a research clinic in Boca Raton. Dr. Maki thought it was a fantastic idea, especially because at the time it was about 10 degrees in Chicago!

They quickly formed a partnership and now have a clinical research facility named after them: the “M” stands for Maki and the “B” stands for Baum. It is because of connections like these that Dr. Maki values his membership in the NLA.

Dr. Maki first became involved with the NLA through his work with Michael Davidson, MD, one of the founders of the NLA. Dr. Maki worked at his research center. Through his interactions with Dr. Davidson and Peter Toth, MD, PhD, he became increasingly interested and involved in the NLA, and the three of them went on to edit a book called Therapeutic Lipidology that was intended to be reference material for people interested in ABCL or CLS certification.  Having spent the last 25 years working on prevention research, Dr. Maki says that “in terms of providing me with a platform to help get my ideas out to clinicians, the NLA has been extremely helpful.”

The majority of Dr. Maki’s research is focused on lifestyle and pharmaceutical interventions for preventing and managing chronic diseases — mainly heart disease and diabetes. Through his involvement with the NLA, Dr. Maki has been able to speak about his findings at meetings and be involved in educational activities to help get some of his ideas into the hands of people who can really utilize them in clinical practice. He believes this is why the NLA has been helpful to him as a researcher. “My job isn’t really complete until I communicate my findings to people who can put them into practice,” he says.

In Dr. Maki’s line of work, there is always more research to be done, and he believes more clinical trials need to occur in the field of lipidology. He would like to see more done about some of the most important clinical questions, such as the influence of dietary approaches to reducing the incidence of cardiovascular events and type 2 diabetes, and the effects of therapies that target triglyceride-rich lipoprotein lowering on cardiovascular risk.

Dr. Maki finds it very hard to believe that there has not been a large scale dietary intervention trial to evaluate the effective diet on cardiovascular disease events in the U.S. since the 1970s. He fully believes that this is a preventable disease and hopes that when his children are in their 50s, “they will view heart disease the same way I view Polio … as a disease of the past.” When he is not splitting his time between three research centers and teaching Biostatistics and Applied Epidemiology at DePaul University, he enjoys spending time with his wife, Cathy, his son, Miles, and stepdaughter, Sarah. They especially like to spend their down time at their condo in Las Vegas where they can see shows and attractions, such as Red Rock Canyon State Park. In Vegas, Dr. Maki also enjoys one of his favorite pastimes outside of the office, horse race handicapping. He enjoys the endless intellectual challenge of keeping a database of horse races and using statistical modeling to look for value bets. Dr. Maki is a passionate man that puts his whole heart into everything he does in life and we are glad to have him as an influential member of the NLA.

Written by NLA Membership Manager, Britney Caldwell.