Medical doctor and cardiac transplant researcher Lauren Gray Gilstrap, MD, MPH (Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, NH), passed away on October 21, 2022. She was 38 years old. The hospital where she passed away made the announcement on Twitter.

Gilstrap left an indelible mark on her friends, family, and colleagues via her dedication to her studies and her willingness to help those in need.

Her primary honors thesis advisor at medical school, Malissa Wood, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA), told TCTMD, “From the first moment I saw her I knew she was a force to behold.” She had a lot of skill and was devoted to making healthcare better for everyone. She’s going to be sorely missed.

In his recollection of Gilstrap, Dr. Robert Yeh of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, describes her as “a dynamo, a firecracker.” She was the consummate clinician, but she also added so much energy and passion to the team,” he gushed to TCTMD. Since then, she has excelled as a health services investigator and heart failure expert, and I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating directly with her on multiple studies. She was incredibly attentive and generous, and I enjoyed many long chats with her about life and work. It’s hard to find the right words to describe how devastating this loss is.

“She defined what it meant to be a team player,” Dr. Anu Lala (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY) told TCTMD about Gilstrap while they were both fellows there. Lala, who was only a year or two ahead of Gilstrap in school, found her “directness, ambition, and honesty” to be motivating. To me, it was clear that she meant what she said. More than that, Lala remarked, “there was a certain flow that I appreciated in working with her, which was: ‘Let’s get the work done. Help each other out and we can get the job done quicker. Generosity of spirit was present even then.

Gilstrap was a member of the first group of fellows that Brigham and Women’s Hospital program director Donna Polk, MD, MPH (AGME), guided. The teacher was “an incredible human being” and “a dedicated educator,” she said of her. I don’t think we’ll ever know the extent to which her genuine compassion for her patients and for us would have impacted either of our lives.

Polk reflected that Gilstrap “seemed to be able to effortlessly do it all and always had a smile on her face as she was doing it.” “She had this big voice that you always knew she was there, and she was always there one hundred percent whenever she did,” she added. Polk noted that she will be remembered for “her honesty, her compassion, and her patient advocacy.”

Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center head of the Heart and Vascular Center Mark Creager, MD, told TCTMD that he had known Gilstrap since she was a cardiology resident and that he had “jumped at the chance” to recruit her to join his team in New Hampshire. “There aren’t enough superlatives to describe Lauren,” he exclaimed. People often refer to possessing “three birds with one stone,” meaning they excel in the roles of doctor, educator, and researcher. Of course, she was all that and more.

Creager further, calling Gilstrap the “consummate clinician” who could connect with patients of all walks of life, a “dynamic presenter” who stimulated her colleagues and inspired her mentees, and a “highly smart investigator” who was constantly looking for ways to improve patient care.

Lauren was a bright spot in the world. That obviously isn’t true of every person. She was someone whose brilliance was so great that it illuminated everyone around her, he said. Lots of others got to learn from and get experience working with her. Her aura was palpable even before she physically appeared. That woman had a spirit that could fill a room.

Research and Successes

On November 25, 1983, Gilstrap entered the world in Marshall, Texas. She was the class valedictorian in high school and earned a full scholarship to the University of Texas in Austin, proving that she is a brilliant student. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, she remained in the Boston area to complete her general medicine residency at MGH and her fellowships in cardiovascular medicine and heart failure and cardiac transplantation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She also attended Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, where she received her master’s in healthcare policy.

As of 2021, she will be the program head for advanced heart disease and transplant cardiology at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s Heart and Vascular Center, where she will have joined the faculty the previous year. She was also an assistant professor of health policy at The Dartmouth Institute and a co-director of the cardiovascular critical care unit at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine for patients with severe heart disease and transplant cardiology.

Gilstrap’s extensive work—she wrote nearly four dozen peer-reviewed papers throughout her brief career—centered on enhancing the standard of care provided to people suffering from heart failure, especially the elderly and those living in remote areas. She was also the principal investigator on an internal hospital study aiming to enhance care and outcomes for heart failure patients at her institution, as well as research examining the link between Medicaid and clinical outcomes for Black heart failure patients.

She had a strong presence in the academic community, regularly sharing online praise for the accomplishments of her fellow researchers. Even so, Gilstrap could appreciate a good joke. Following the publication of her clinical study on the mortality of Alzheimer’s patients during the 2009 COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, she joked on Twitter, “parents finally accept I’m a’real’ researcher.”

Gilstrap’s expertise in medicine and research was put to use by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) as she contributed to the program’s Heart Failure Self-Assessment Program by writing practice questions. Another organization where she volunteered was the Good Neighbor Health Clinic (White River Junction, VT). Gilstrap has received a number of teaching and lecturer awards in recent years from the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s Department of Medicine and the Geisel School of Medicine.

After graduating from medical school in 2010, Gilstrap was featured in an article published by The Marshall News Messenger as saying that her time with patients had a profound impact on her. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time working in a hospital, it’s that not a day should pass without you telling your significant other that you love them,” she said. “If you’re fortunate enough to still have living parents or grandparents, you should spend time with them.”

Her husband, Janet Milley, and two children, Katelyn and David, as well as her parents, Rodney and Sherry Gilstrap, brother and sister-in-law, Stephen and Meggie Gilstrap, and nieces, Abbie and Zoe, all survive her.

Funeral services will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday, October 29, 2022, at The Church of Christ at Dartmouth College (40 College Street in Hanover).

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