Sándor J. Kovács

Sándor J. Kovács (born August 17, 1947) is a Hungarian-American academic cardiologist and cardiovascular physiologist, best known for his work on the physiological dynamics of the human heart. He is a professor of medicine, physics, physiology, and biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Kovács, with his parents and sister, fled Hungary at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. His earliest memories are of scarcity and hardship during the communist era. The family was interned in Austrian refugee camps until 1959, when they were allowed to immigrate to Brooklyn, New York. As Kovács recalled in an interview,

I remember there were no refrigerators, just iceboxes. And if you wanted chicken for dinner, you went to the market and brought home a live chicken, holding it by its feet.

Kovács graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and earned a B.S. in engineering at Cornell University in 1969. He then went to Caltech, where he initially studied theoretical and applied mechanics, transferred to physics and worked with Kip S. Thorne, receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1977. The title of his thesis was "The Generation of Gravitational Waves". While at Caltech, he was influenced by many interactions with Richard Feynman and George Zweig, when the latter was interested in the physics and physiology of human hearing.

Determined to change from theoretical physics to medicine, Kovács entered an accelerated Ph.D. to M.D. program at the University of Miami that awarded him a medical degree after 22 months of concentrated study, in 1979.

Kovács' subsequent career has been entirely at Washington University in St. Louis. After an internship and residency at Barnes Hospital, he became an instructor in medicine in 1985, served as director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at the St Louis VA Medical Center (1985-1990) advancing through the ranks to professor of medicine, with also appointments in physiology, biomedical engineering, and physics, in 2007.

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