The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) gives few awards. To a greater degree than its American counterparts, the ESC focuses its awards on its core audience: “over 85 000 cardiology professionals, principally from across Europe and the Mediterranean basin, but also from the rest of the world.”

The ESC gives one to three Gold Medals each year, often to former presidents of the Society, most often to Europeans. Thus it is a big deal when the ESC honors a non-European with its Gold Medal, with which it recognizes “exceptional cardiologists for their contribution to medicine and hopes that by recognising them, they will be an inspiration to future generations.”

This year, in London, the European Society of Cardiology gave three Gold Medals, one to Richard Popp, MD (professor emeritus, Cardiovascular Medicine).

It is the fact that this award recognizes the corpus of his life’s work, almost all of which has been done at Stanford, and thus recognizes Stanford as well that makes Popp comfortable enough to briefly discuss this honor.

After medical school and residency at Johns Hopkins, where he was guided into cardiology by some mentors, Popp arrived at Indiana University as an invasive cardiology fellow. And there he was introduced to echocardiography. He began working with Harvey Feigenbaum, MD, “who was the first to popularize echocardiography in this country,” Popp explains. “He had just figured out how to find pericardial effusion. We worked with the engineers to improve the equipment to the point where we could see the interventricular septum and then measure the chambers of the heart. Once we could measure the chambers, we came up with ways of calculating stroke volume and ejection fraction.”

Moving to Stanford for his second year of cardiology fellowship, he ”spent a year validating stroke volume and mitral stenosis and all kinds of exciting things.” After service in the Army, Popp “came back to Stanford as a faculty member and have been here ever since. I got to be involved with basically every part of echocardiography. I got to work with industry engineers, who taught me how to be a biomedical engineer. The equipment kept getting better, and we kept finding better ways to do ultrasound.”

Popp was a participant in the transformation of ultrasound from B-mode to two- and later three-dimensional echocardiography. He recalls a turning point occurring  “when I had this absolutely spectacular fellow, Paul Yock, who told me about Liv Hatle in Norway, who had worked out that you could probably measure pressure differences, gradients, with Doppler. She came and spent two years collaborating with us at Stanford.”

“A lot of what now is standard of care is stuff that we helped develop, and that was really exciting,” Popp states, “because then you didn’t have to do catheterization anymore. If you wanted to know what an aortic valve gradient was, or check for mitral stenosis, you used ultrasound.  About the only thing that ultrasound doesn’t do really well yet is assess mitral regurgitation, and that’s coming.”

Looking back on his career at Stanford, Popp focuses on the trainees with whom he has worked. The main thing, he says, is that “over 150 cardiology fellows have come through the echo lab. Today many of them are running their own labs and are very prominent cardiologists. We can all be very proud of that.”