It is with immense sadness that we announce that a dedicated ASE and ASE Foundation champion, James Kirkpatrick, MD, FASE, University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC), passed away unexpectedly on January 1, 2025. Dr. Kirkpatrick was a highly respected colleague, mentor, and friend to all who knew him.
Dr. Kirkpatrick graduated from Pomona College and received his MD from Loma Linda University. He completed his internship and residency at Yale in internal medicine and clinical medical ethics and cardiology fellowships at the University of Chicago. He was one of the few ethics-trained cardiologists in the United States. He was on the cardiovascular and ethics faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, before he joined UWMC cardiology in 2015 as Professor of Medicine, Section Chief of Cardiac Imaging, and the Director of the Echo lab at UWMC. He was also a Professor of Bioethics and Humanities, the Ethics Committee Chair, and an Ethics Consultant at UWMC.
Dr. Kirkpatrick’s volunteerism for ASE began in 2009 just three years after joining ASE as a Scientific Sessions Abstract Grader. This was just the beginning of a tremendous volunteer career at ASE that included serving on the ASE Board of Directors 2016-2019 and most recently as the chair of the ASE Foundation Board (2022-2024). He was currently serving as the chair of the Awards Committee and co-chair of Echo Hawaii that is set to take place in a couple weeks. He was the chair of the 2023 ASE Scientific Sessions, an advocate for and 
member of the ImageGuideEcho Registry, a key member in creating the Critical Care Echocardiography Specialty Interest Group that became a Council in 2022, and a member of the JASE Editorial Board (2016-2022).
Dr. Kirkpatrick gave many lectures at ASE Scientific Sessions over the years, including the Richard E. Kerber Ethics/Humanitarian Lecture titled “Ethical Challenges in the Practice of Echocardiography: What is Right and How Do We Do It?” in 2018. He was the chair of the September 2024 ASE Guideline “Recommendations for Cardiac Point-of-Care Ultrasound Nomenclature” and the April 2020 “Recommendations for Echocardiography Laboratories Participating in POCUS and Critical Care Echocardiography Training.” He also served on the writing group of the August 2015 “Echocardiography in the Management of Patients with LVADs,” and chaired two ASE COVID statements (2020 and 2024).
Everyone who knew Dr. Kirkpatrick knew he was passionate about education and global health events in medically underserved areas. He was an integral leader on five 
ASE Foundation Global Health outreach events in Vietnam, which is the home country of his wife Thanh. His goal was to establish sustainable medical education mechanisms that would yield long-lasting benefits even after the Foundation’s volunteers left.
Dr. Kirkpatrick’s dedication to his patients, his peers, and the field of cardiovascular ultrasound will be tremendously missed. Our hearts go out to his wife and his three children, his colleagues at the University of Washington, and his ASE family.