William H. Sauer, MD, is Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, where he serves as Network Director for Cardiac Electrophysiology and Director of Translational Research in the Section of Cardiology.
Dr. Sauer trained at the University of Pennsylvania, earning bachelor's degrees in bioengineering and biology followed by his MD, and completing residency and fellowship training in internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, and clinical cardiac electrophysiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the University of Colorado faculty in 2006 as the institution's sole cardiac electrophysiologist, building a world-class clinical and academic program there. In 2019, he moved to Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital as Section Chief of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service within the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine before being recruited to the University of Chicago in 2026.
In 2012, Dr. Sauer established an ablation biophysics laboratory, first at Colorado and later at Harvard, to systematically investigate how catheter contact, power, timing, and electrode configuration affect tissue heating and lesion formation. This work produced several innovations now used clinically, including bipolar radiofrequency ablation between two opposing catheter tips for deep intramural arrhythmia circuits, half-normal saline as an electrode-cooling irrigant to improve lesion depth, and heat-sensitive liposomal constructs that release cardiotoxic agents selectively into ablated tissue to improve lesion durability. He holds three US patents related to arrhythmia therapy delivery and ablation catheter design. His most recent work applies stored implantable defibrillator electrograms to guide targeted ablation of the fascicular Purkinje system in patients with ventricular fibrillation, and his laboratory is now focused on pulsed field ablation, a non-thermal electroporation-based energy source, including its interaction with metallic cardiac implants and strategies to optimize lesion selectivity.
Dr. Sauer is a founding member of the International Ventricular Tachycardia Center Collaboration and has contributed to multicenter analyses of ventricular tachycardia ablation outcomes. He co-chaired the Heart Rhythm Society's Expert Consensus Statement on the Diagnosis and Management of Arrhythmias Associated with Cardiac Sarcoidosis, which remains an authoritative international guideline, and continues to study arrhythmic risk and outcomes in cardiac sarcoidosis. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, along with book chapters, guideline documents, and contributions to Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, and currently serves as principal or site investigator on multiple active clinical trials evaluating pulsed field ablation and other emerging arrhythmia technologies.
Mentorship of trainees has been a consistent thread throughout Dr. Sauer's research career: most of his highly cited research publications were written with him as senior author, and many of the fellows and residents he has trained have gone on to prominent faculty positions at academic medical centers. In 2020 he co-founded the Electrophysiology Fellows Summit and Global Arrhythmia Scholars Program, which now reaches approximately 900 cardiologists and electrophysiologists across 92 countries annually. At the University of Chicago, he is working to build a collaborative translational research infrastructure within the Section of Cardiology that connects laboratory discovery to investigator-initiated clinical trials.