Dr. Sunil Rao
Interventional Cardiologist
2 Podcasts on BackTable
Dr. Sunil Rao is a professor of medicine and director of interventional cardiology at NYU Langone Health System in New York.
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Episode # 5 • 25 Jun 2026
ACS Guidelines Question #1
The following question refers to Section 7.1 of the 2025 ACS Guidelines.
A 68-year-old man with a history of hypertension, hyperlipidemia, stage III chronic kidney disease, and prior tobacco use presents to a local emergency department with reports of chest pain while raking leaves at home. Upon arrival, he is hemodynamically stable with a heart rate of 86 beats per minute and a blood pressure of 133/85 mmHg. His EKG reveals ST elevations in the septal and anterior leads (V1-V4). He is given 324mg of aspirin and is promptly evaluated by the interventional cardiology team, who elects to take him emergently to the catheterization lab. Upon arrival to the catheterization lab, the nurse asks the interventional fellow which access sites they should prep for this case? How should the interventional fellow respond?
This episode is part of our comprehensive Decipher the Guidelines Series covering the 2025 ACC/AHA/ACEP/NAEMSP/SCAI Guideline for the Management of Patients With Acute Coronary Syndromes.
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About
Dr. Rao is a professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of interventional cardiology for the NYU Langone Health System. He graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Oxford, OH, and magna cum laude from The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine and fellowships in cardiology and interventional cardiology at Duke University Medical Center. He served as chief fellow at The Duke Clinical Research Institute and was the Warren and Gloria A. Newman Fellow in Interventional Cardiology. After training, he joined the faculty at Duke University Medical Center as an assistant professor of medicine and rose to become a professor of medicine in 2017. In 2005, he became the director of the catheterization laboratories at the Durham VA Medical Center, and in 2014, he was appointed chief of cardiology at the Durham VA. In 2022, he was recruited to be the director of interventional cardiology for the NYU Langone Health System. He was the 2022-2023 President of SCAI.
He has won several awards, including the W. Proctor Harvey Award from The American College of Cardiology (2011), the Duke Cardiology Fellows’ Mentoring Award (2013, 2018), and The Duke Clinical Research Institute Robert M. Califf MD Award for Fellow Mentoring (2020). Dr. Rao has published over 400 peer-reviewed manuscripts. His main research interests are antithrombotic therapies for ACS and PCI, and novel interventional therapies for ischemic heart disease. At the national level, Dr. Rao serves as the editor-in-chief for Circulation Cardiovascular Interventions, the interventional journal of the American Heart Association’s flagship Circulation family of journals, and is co-editor-in-chief of the ACC Collaborative Management Pathway for board certification.
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