Dr. Kjersti Aagaard, M.D. Ph.D. MSCI is honored and thrilled to serve as the Medical Director of HCA Gulf Coast Division and Texas Maternal Fetal Medicine and serves on the HCA Women’s Research Advisory Board and at the national Medical Director level. She carries research scientist appointments with Boston Children's Hospital at Harvard Medical School and the Oregon National Primate Research Center. 

Prior to joining HCA, Dr. Aagaard served as the Henry & Emma Meyer Endowered Chair and Professor in Obstetrics & Gynecology and Vice Chair of Research at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, where she practiced Maternal Fetal Medicine and was a valued physician, scientist, educator and leader for two decades. Dr. Aagaard earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Mills College, her Ph.D. in Immunology from Mayo Graduate School of Medicine and her M.D. from the University of Minnesota, where she also completed her residency in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Dr. Aagaard completed her fellowship in maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Utah, where she concomitantly earned a Masters in Clinical Investigation. Dr. Aagaard is a renowned clinician, specializing in preterm birth and congenital anomalies, and pregnancies complicated by diabetes, hypertension and infectious diseases. Dr. Aagaard’s impact has been nationally recognized with receipt of numerous awards over the years, including the Michael E. Debakey Excellence in Research Award (2015), the Nature Award for Outstanding Scientific Mentorship (2019), election to the American Society of Clinical Investigators (2019) the SRI President’s Achievement Award (2020), and the Society of Toxicology Translational Research Impact Award (2023). Dr. Aagaard is a frequent visiting professor and key note speaker at many institutions and national and international meetings, and in 2017 she gave an invited presentation for the Nobel Symposium on ‘Unexpected Beginnings in the Development of Our Microbiome’ at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In addition, Dr. Aagaard is a dedicated and awarded educator, teaching continuously since 2007 in the schools of medicine and biomedical graduate sciences and served as the co-Director of the Baylor College of Medicine MSTP MD/PhD program for 13 years. Dr. Aagaard has always remained dedicated to serving pregnant patients as their physician, and she has been elected to Texas SuperDoctors every year for over a decade.

In addition to her role as a direct patient care maternal fetal medicine physician, Dr. Aagaard has been dedicated to findings cures through research. With continuous NIH funding since 2005, she and her team members have shared their landmark discoveries and developed technologies that have enriched translational and discovery science, particularly within perinatal and pregnancy-related research. Dr. Aagaard has been supported in this work by funding from the March of Dimes, the Burroughs Welcome Fund, USAID, the Gates Foundation, the Thrasher Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Nationally, she has served on multiple NIH and National Academy of Sciences Committees and Advisory panels, multiple society leadership roles, and was a permanent member of the NICHD Pregnancy & Neonatology study section through 2017. Dr. Aagaard’s sentinel set of scientific contributions has centered around (1) developing novel and relevant primate models for translational research, (2) conducting high impact discovery science with a wide set of 'omics technologies, and (3) executing high impact, high rigor clinical trials research. She and her team have published over 300 original manuscripts.

When not caring for patients or engaging in research, you can find her with her family (including her fur babies) running or riding the trails around their home in Tomball Texas.