BARATHI SETHURAMAN, PH.D.

Areas of Expertise: structural heart, cardiovascular devices, cardiovascular disease, clinical trials.

Barathi Sethuraman is divisional vice president of global clinical affairs for Abbott's structural heart division. In this role, she has oversight of clinical evidence generation, clinical trial design and execution, and dissemination of clinical trial results for the business.

Barathi started her career as a statistician at LifeScan. She joined a startup called Evalve (now Abbott), a manufacturer of a novel percutaneous technology to treat mitral valve regurgitation (MitraClip), as a clinical director in 2008. Joining St. Jude Medical (now Abbott), as vice president of clinical science in 2015, Barathi was responsible for the design and analysis of a number of pivotal clinical trials to support FDA approval. Under her leadership there, the Amplatzer PFO Occluder was brought to an FDA advisory panel meeting, which ultimately led to the first FDA approval of a novel treatment for patients who have a hole in the heart and have suffered a stroke. 

At Abbott, she oversaw the completion and reporting of the COAPT trial, a landmark study of MitraClip which led to the approval of the therapy for heart failure patients suffering from mitral valve regurgitation. 

Barathi holds a master's degree in statistics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. She also received a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.