Dr. Qiong “Joan” Zhao is the Regional Medical Director of Cardiac Diagnostics and Director of Research, Cardiac Diagnostics at Inova Schar Heart and Vascular. Board certified in cardiovascular disease, Dr. Zhao spent years at Inova developing the cardiac diagnostics department at Inova Fairfax Medical Center before stepping into her current role.

Dr. Zhao's clinical areas of interest include echocardiography, structural heart disease, cardiomyopathy, cardio-oncology, pulmonary vascular diseases and women's heart diseases. After graduating from Beijing Medical University, Dr. Zhao earned a PhD in cell and molecular biology from Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha and completed her postdoctoral research fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center – Harvard Medical School in Boston. She then completed her pathology internship training at University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, KS, followed by medical residency training at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, MA. She completed fellowship training in cardiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center and continued with one year of subspecialty training in advanced echocardiography at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s cardiology division. She then stayed on at Feinberg as an attending physician and an Assistant Professor of Medicine.

In 2013, she became the Medical Director of Echocardiography at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Zhao moved to Northern Virginia in 2014 and joined Inova in 2015. She is currently an attending physician in cardiology and Medical Director of Echocardiography at Inova Schar Heart and Vascular. She is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine's Inova campus.

Dr. Zhao has received multiple travel grant awards from national medical associations to both attend and present at scientific conferences. In 2006 and 2007, she received the Northwestern Young Investigator Award for her research. In 2008, she was awarded the prestigious Jay N. Cohn New Investigator Award from the Heart Failure Society of America. Dr. Zhao's clinical research interests include echocardiography, women's heart disease, structural heart disease, cardiomyopathy and heart failure. She has a special interest and expertise in 3D echocardiography and strain imaging, structural heart diseases, pulmonary hypertension and cardio-oncology. Currently, she is the principal investigator of echocardiography clinical trials and a subinvestigator in multiple other clinical trials at Inova Schar Heart and Vascular. Her basic/translational research is in the field of pressure overload-induced cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure, which was funded by NHLBI.

Dr. Zhao is active in academic activities and services. She has served on committees of the American Society of Echocardiography since 2010, and she is currently the Clinical President of the Chinese American Academy of Cardiology.

Podcasts and Webinars

Cardiovascular Effects of Breast Cancer Treatment. June 2021.