James Kneller is one of the nation’s leading heart rhythm specialists. Dr. Kneller is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) in clinical cardiac electrophysiology, cardiovascular disease, and internal medicine. As a Fellow of the Heart Rhythm Society (FHRS) and Certified Cardiac Device Specialist (CCDS), Kneller provides comprehensive patient care, combining best medical practice with invasive procedures using state-of-the-art technologies to treat heart rhythm disorders.
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His procedural skills encompass both device implantation and management, and catheter ablation. His device procedures include pacemakers, implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs), subcutaneous ICDs (S-ICD), and cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) with both pacemaker (CRT-P) and defibrillator (CRT-D) systems. Dr. Kneller performs catheter ablation of supra-ventricular tachycardia (SVT), atrial flutter, atrial fibrillation (AF), ventricular tachycardia (VT), and premature ventricular contractions (PVCs).
Kneller first graduated magna cum laude with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Walla Walla University in 1995
Subsequently with a MSc in Bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. His master’s thesis was conducted with Dr. Harvey Borovetz, in association with the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Pitt. His original work in quantitative cardiac physiology represents some of the earliest work in the delivery of drug therapy from intracoronary stents.
In 2004, Dr. Kneller graduated with honors from the MD, PhD program at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His doctoral research was mentored by Dr. Stanley Nattel at the Montreal Heart Institute, and also by Dr. L. Joshua Leon, Dr. Marc Courtemanche, and Dr. Edward J. Vigmond. His dissertation was titled “Mechanisms of atrial fibrillation and antiarrhythmic drug therapy evaluated by mathematical modeling.”
Cardiovascular Disease Fellowship at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York (2007-10), conducting research in arrhythmia imaging while supported by a Glorney Raisbeck Fellowship from the New York Academy of Medicine.
Subsequently, he completed clinical electrophysiology fellowship at the UCLA Ronald Regan Medical Center in Los Angeles (2010-11) with Dr. Kalyanam Shivkumar, and at Virginia Commonwealth University Health System with Dr Kenneth A. Ellenbogen and Dr. Mark A. Wood (2011-12).
Mechanisms of atrial fibrillation and antiarrhythmic drug therapy evaluated by mathematical modeling.” This work included two manuscripts published in Circulation Research, entitled: “Cholinergic atrial fibrillation in a computer model of a 2-dimensional sheet of canine atrial cells with realistic ionic properties” (Circ Res. 2002), followed by “Mechanisms of atrial fibrillation termination by pure sodium channel blockade in an ionically-realistic mathematical model” (Circ Res. 2005).
In these studies, Kneller developed the first mathematical model of a sustained arrhythmia, and subsequently used the model to solve the mechanism of atrial fibrillation termination by class I antiarrhythmic drugs, which to date have been both the most successful, but also the most poorly understood class of atrial fibrillation (AF)-terminating drug in clinical practice.
Presently he has authored over 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts as well as numerous abstracts, and his work has been cited over 1000 times.
