 Dr. Handberg is a Research Professor of Medicine and Director of the Cardiovascular Clinical Trials Program in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and Program Co-Director, OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium. She has served the University as an Institutional Review Board member for 21 years was a College of Medicine CME Division representative for 20 years and served on Promotion and Tenure. She is an Adult Nurse Practitioner and has had an outpatient practice, and currently practices on the interventional cardiology inpatient service, and manages research patient care. Dr. Handberg has a 34 year history of work in cardiovascular research starting as a research coordinator on the NIH SOLVD trial and other industry sponsored research trials in 1986. She completed her PhD in 1998 with a minor in exercise science and joined the faculty at UF as the Director of the Cardiovascular Clinical Trials Program. She has been the Co-I and PI on federally funded projects since 1986 including NIH funded efforts such as SOLVD, AFFIRM, CABG Patch Trial, ACIP, PIMI, WISE, WHI, BARI-2D, Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Network (I and II), HFACTION as well as hundreds of industry funded trials, and investigator initiated trials (TIDES, TIDES II, M-HEART I and II, ASIST, INVEST, Q-WISE, R-WISE). She is the Co-Director of the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium and has served as the co-PI of PCORI funded ADAPTABLE trial. She is current the PI of the WARRIOR Data Coordinating Center, funded by DoD, and PI for the OneFlorida consortium of sites for the ACTIV4 outpatient trial. She is a nationally and internationally known speaker and educator serving as the Program Co-Chair for the Core Curriculum for Cardiovascular Clinicians provided by the ACC for the past 11 years. She has contributed to over 164 peer reviewed manuscripts, 183 abstracts, 3 books, 8 book chapters. She serves on 3 editorial boards for cardiology journals, and has peer reviewed for 15 journals.
Professionally she is member of several organizations including the American College of Cardiology, PCNA, AHA and AANP. She has been every active in the ACC with past service as the first nurse on the Board of Trustees, Chair of the Nurse Education Committee and Cardiovascular Team Section, Membership, Board of Governors, Accreditation, and currently serving on the Governance Committee. She was the first Nurse to receive FACC (Fellow of the American College of Cardiology) designation. She is currently an active Board member of PCNA and serves on the Finance, and CE Committees and is currently President-Elect. She belongs to the Council of Cardiovascular Nursing of the AHA. She has Chaired the writing group for the ANA Scope and Standards for Cardiovascular Nursing twice, and was a lead author on the ACC Policy Statement on Team Based Care.
Her research interests have been diverse across the spectrum of ischemic heart disease. There has been a focus on heart disease in women with the WISE/WARRIOR portfolio of projects; ischemic heart disease with pharmacological treatments as well as stem cell therapy interventions with the NIH funded Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Network and other industry sponsored trials, exercise interventions as part of investigator initiated projects and NIH funded HFAction trial. Her expertise is in IHD, Hypertension, Prevention and Exercise combined with the development and operationalization of clinical trials. |
