Michael M. Shehata, MD, FHRS, FACC is the inaugural chairholder of the Simms/Mann Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Cardiac Electrophysiology at Cedars-Sinai. Dr. Shehata is a board-certified Cardiac Electrophysiology Faculty Physician for the Division of Cardiac Electrophysiology in the Department of Cardiology Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai. Dr. Shehata is Director of the Interventional Electrophysiology Laboratory and is the Fellowship Program Director-Cardiac Electrophysiology. 

An advocate for academia, training, and education, he also has an academic title of Professor of Medicine at Cedars Sinai and Associate Professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine as well as multiple peer reviewed manuscripts published annually in leading cardiology and EP journals. Dr. Shehata received his undergraduate degree at University of California Los Angeles in Chemical Engineering and earned his medical degree at University of California San Diego School of Medicine. He trained in cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology at Cedars-Sinai and then went on to UCLA as a junior faculty member in the Cardiac Arrhythmia Center. In 2008, he came to Cedars-Sinai to build the clinical arrhythmia service and was appointed Director of the Implanted Cardiac Devices Clinic—involved in caring for patients with electronic devices such as defibrillators and pacemakers. He has also taken an interest in clinical trials focused on implementing new arrhythmia device technology at Cedars-Sinai.

In 2017, Dr. Shehata was promoted to Fellowship Program Director for the Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology Training Program. He is closely involved in daily teaching providing both a regular didactic series as well as regular clinical hands-on procedural training in the Electrophysiology field. He also has significant teaching responsibilities in the Cardiovascular Fellowship Training Program with a focus on cardiac arrhythmias and their management in which he trains both resident and fellow physicians at Cedars-Sinai. Additionally, he has been involved with improving resident and fellow training with the use of Simulation Center here at Cedars assisting in the development of a curriculum geared towards cardiac procedures.

Dr. Shehata has worked diligently along with his colleagues to improve and broaden the Cardiac Electrophysiology (EP) services at Cedars-Sinai with the goal of having a world class academic EP program. He performs relatively more complex cardiac catheter ablation procedures as well as cardiac device implantation (pacemakers and defibrillators) and has brought new referral cases to the Heart Rhythm Center for tertiary level care. He was promoted to become Director of the Interventional Electrophysiology Laboratory in 2018 and has overseen a tremendous growth in electrophysiology procedures while maintaining excellent procedural outcomes and efficiency.

He founded and runs the leadless pacemaker implantation program at the hospital which is one of the few programs currently in California and is the largest in the Western United States. Dr. Shehata has an active research program and has acted as the principal investigator (PI) on multiple groundbreaking trials in novel ablation therapies for atrial fibrillation using pulsed field ablation, as well as leading the MICRA clinical trial and AVEIR DR trial at Cedars implanting novel completely leadless pacemakers in humans. He is currently also working on the use of unique mapping technologies in human atrial fibrillation that use machine learning to predict key drivers of atrial fibrillation unique to the individual patient with the goal of improving outcomes in treating this challenging arrhythmia.

Dr. Shehata also currently serves as the interim Chief of the Division of Cardiac Electrophysiology at the Smidt Heart Institute.