A Heart-Pumping Research Ride

Growing up in Shelburne, Vt., Tim Plante ’06, M.D.’11 always had his sights set high. “I've liked science and math since I was a little kid. I always wanted to be either an astronaut or a doctor,” he says. His parents initially dissuaded him from a medical career, going so far as to send him to Space Camp.

“I got to ride on all of these high-tech simulators, and Buzz Aldrin randomly showed up while we were there,” says Plante. “It was fun for a scienceinterested, pretty nerdy kid like myself, but I ultimately couldn’t see a clear path to being an astronaut.”

Luckily, Plante had a good fallback plan. He felt called to a medical career, and he had deep roots at UVM. His Catamount legacy stretched back to his grandfather, Simon Plante ’50, and extended to many family members. So just as his father, Dennis Plante ’75, M.D.’79, had done, he ventured a few miles up the road to study zoology and then earn his medical degree from UVM.

After his residency at Georgetown University and post doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University, he and his wife, Emily Coderre ’06, Ph.D. (a professor in the Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders), were drawn back to Vermont—and their alma mater.

“We asked ourselves, tongue-incheek, where we would want to be in an apocalypse. We didn’t know it would turn out to be such a relevant question!” says Plante. “Also, I am trained as a cardiovascular disease epidemiologist, but it took going to Johns Hopkins to learn that UVM is actually one of the premier places to be for molecular epidemiology.”

Early on as a physician-scientist at UVM, Plante conducted important clinical research with renowned groups from across the country aimed at identifying the causes of cardiovascular disease. But he still faced a challenge common to all young investigators: the need to support his work with competitive grants. This funding is key to a researcher’s ability to gather data that prove the efficacy of their big ideas.

So you might say the stars aligned in 2020, when Plante was appointed to the Bloomfield Early Career Professorship in Cardiovascular Research, which had been established in 2016 by Martin ’56, M.D.’60 and Judith ’59 Bloomfield, longtime supporters of the Larner College of Medicine.

Bloomfield says he still recalls how difficult it was to find the time and resources necessary to conduct research as a young cardiologist. He was further inspired by the endowed professorship his son earned as a junior faculty member at Columbia University, which allowed his medical research projects to flourish. “I did some research. There are only a handful of places in the country that offer early career professorships, so I thought this would be a very important resource to have at the University of Vermont.”

“The Bloomfield professorship has been transformational for me,” says Plante, noting that it has paid for expensive preliminary lab tests. “Those results could pave the way to millions of dollars of additional grant funding down the road.”

Plante says he is fortunate that his access to funding—and research that he is passionate about—has accelerated in the past few years. He is a long-term participant in an NIH-funded cohort study to better understand the origins of high blood pressure, particularly in a key minority population.

“Black adults in the U.S. have among the highest burden of cardiovascular disease of any community in the world, and we can't entirely explain why. To move the needle on health equality, we need to understand the cause, and that's a big motivator for me.”

To that end, Plante also helped establish a UVM-Johns Hopkins project, recently awarded a multimillion-dollar grant from the American Heart Association, which aims to increase the participation of Black U.S. adults in cardiovascular disease trials. “Winning that grant shows where we are in the big leagues of research. It's very exciting to see where this is going to take us.”

For Plante, the biostatistical data analysis he does on his laptop gives him the same rush he felt on those simulators at Space Camp.

“To be at a place like UVM, to receive the support I have here, is unbelievable. To have the Bloomfield professorship on top of all that is a catalyst for success. It's really been like getting on a rocket ship.”