Top Cardiologists in California 2026

Dr. Fonarow is interim chief of cardiology at UCLA and directs the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center, a referral program for advanced heart failure. His patients include people with weakened hearts, people evaluating transplant or mechanical support, and people trying to prevent a second cardiac event after a heart attack.

He built much of the practical toolkit that emergency rooms and hospitals now use to manage acute heart failure. A 2005 JAMA study he led created the first widely adopted risk model for in-hospital mortality in decompensated heart failure, giving doctors a way to sort patients who need intensive care from those safe for the regular ward ¹. He also co-authored a widely cited analysis showing that higher body weight is associated with better — not worse — survival in chronic heart failure, a counterintuitive finding that reshaped how cardiologists counsel overweight patients about prognosis ². His reviews in Nature Reviews Cardiology remain among the most cited summaries of heart-failure epidemiology and causes ³⁴.

Dr. Gerstenfeld is chief of cardiac electrophysiology at UCSF Medical Center and holds the Scheinman Endowed Chair. He treats patients with heart-rhythm disorders, with a particular focus on atrial fibrillation — the irregular, fast rhythm that raises stroke risk and is one of the most common reasons people end up in a cardiology office.

He was the first and corresponding author on the ADVENT trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2023, which compared a new technique called pulsed field ablation against conventional heat- or cold-based ablation for paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. Pulsed field ablation uses brief electric pulses that damage heart muscle tissue selectively while sparing nearby structures like the esophagus and phrenic nerve. The trial found it was no worse than conventional ablation for keeping AFib away and caused similar rates of serious complications ⁵. That result helped move pulsed field ablation into routine use at high-volume centers. He also contributed to the international HRS/EHRA consensus statement that defines how catheter ablation for AFib is done ⁶⁷.

Dr. Aboulhosn directs the Ahmanson/UCLA Adult Congenital Heart Disease Center at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. His practice is devoted to adults who were born with heart defects — a rapidly growing population, because most children with complex congenital disease now survive into adulthood and need lifelong specialist care.

His clinical focus covers the full range of congenital lesions: tetralogy of Fallot, single-ventricle physiology, coarctation of the aorta, and complications after childhood repairs. He was part of the writing committee for the 2018 AHA/ACC guideline on managing adults with congenital heart disease, which remains the primary reference cardiologists use when a patient with a childhood heart defect walks into an adult clinic ¹¹¹². He also contributed to a large multicenter study that quantified the burden of arrhythmias in adults decades after tetralogy of Fallot repair — finding that more than 40 percent of these patients develop a sustained rhythm problem or require an arrhythmia intervention, which is now the basis for long-term monitoring recommendations ¹⁵.

Dr. Yeung is a professor of cardiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His clinical and research focus has been on coronary artery disease, endothelial function, and the microcirculation — the smallest blood vessels in the heart that account for much of the chest pain patients experience even when their large arteries look clean on an angiogram.

A 1991 New England Journal of Medicine study he led as first author showed that mental stress — not just physical exertion — can constrict diseased coronary arteries, a finding that reframed how cardiologists think about angina triggers ²⁰. Earlier work connected abnormal responses to acetylcholine in the coronary arteries to standard risk factors like smoking and high cholesterol, strengthening the link between vascular biology and everyday prevention ¹⁷. A 1995 trial he contributed to showed that cholesterol-lowering and antioxidant therapy improved how coronary arteries respond to stress, one of the early mechanistic explanations for why statins help ¹⁸. He also helped develop a catheter-based technique for invasively assessing the coronary microcirculation — a tool that now helps diagnose patients with chest pain and no obvious blockages ¹⁹.

Dr. Kobashigawa is associate director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and directs the heart transplant program, one of the largest in the country. He cares for patients before, during, and long after heart transplantation, including those dealing with rejection and transplant-related coronary disease.

He was first author on a landmark 1995 New England Journal of Medicine trial showing that pravastatin, a cholesterol-lowering drug, reduced the incidence of severe rejection and slowed the development of coronary disease in transplanted hearts ²². That result made statins a standard part of post-transplant care, and it is a big reason long-term survival improved so dramatically in the years that followed. He also led a randomized trial establishing mycophenolate mofetil — now a workhorse immunosuppressant — as superior to an older drug for preventing rejection in the first year after heart transplant ²³. His work on standardizing how pathologists grade rejection on heart-biopsy samples gave the field a shared language and made it possible to compare outcomes across transplant centers ²¹.

Dr. Schnittger is a professor of medicine in cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. She specializes in echocardiography — the ultrasound imaging used to evaluate the heart's structure and function — and her work has focused on patients whose heart disease comes from unusual sources, including cancer treatment.

She co-authored the 1989 Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography recommendations for measuring the left ventricle by two-dimensional echo, one of the most cited papers in cardiac imaging and still the basis for how heart function is quantified in clinics today ²⁷. Her later work on Hodgkin's lymphoma survivors was among the first to document just how common silent heart disease is in people who were treated with chest radiation years or decades earlier ²⁸. A follow-up study laid out a screening approach for coronary artery disease in this population ²⁹. She also helped establish how transesophageal echocardiography detects the heart-based sources of stroke ³⁰ and evaluates aortic dissection, a life-threatening emergency where early imaging is critical ³¹.