Dr. Lauer received his research training in cardiovascular epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health and the Framingham Heart Study. After coming to Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1993, he launched a research program focusing on the prognostic value of exercise treadmill testing and noninvasive imaging among patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease. He has been particularly interested in the association of autonomic nervous system measures, particularly chronotropic response and heart rate recovery, with the severity of cardiovascular disease, other chronic illnesses like diabetes and obstructive lung disease, and with long-term all cause mortality. More recently, he has focused on systematic analyses of large databases for assessment of the effectiveness of various cardiovascular therapies. Because of the many inherent biases in this type of research, he has developed a working collaboration with other epidemiologists, statisticians, and mathematical operations researchers to identify optimal methods of bias-free prediction. He recently received support from the NIH to directly compare multiple methods of prediction including proportional hazards regression, time-decomposed parametric hazard regression, random forests, and logical analysis of data. Since 2005 Dr. Lauer has served as a contributing editor for JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). In addition to handling cardiovascular manuscripts, he is also the head Series Editor for the Journal’s "Clinical Reviews." In July 2007 Dr. Lauer began service as the Director of the Division of Prevention and Population Science of NHLBI/NIH. This Division annually oversees $300 million of extramural research in cardiovascular epidemiology, women's health, and trials in prevention.