Dr. Donahue completed undergraduate and medical education at Washington University in St. Louis, followed by an internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and fellowships in cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology at the Johns Hopkins University.  After completion of his medical training in 1999, Dr. Donahue served on the medical faculty at Johns Hopkins, where he attained the rank of Associate Professor prior to his 2005 relocation to Case Western Reserve University-MetroHealth Campus.  He was promoted to Professor at Case Western in 2011.  In 2013, Dr. Donahue relocated to the University of Massachusetts Medical School to start a position as Director of Electrophysiology Research. 

Dr. Donahue’s primary research interests are the elucidation of mechanisms, and from that, the development of therapies for cardiac arrhythmias.  As a means to that end, the Donahue lab has developed several gene therapy methods and created novel animal models of cardiac arrhythmias.  The Donahue lab was first to show efficacy of gene therapy for a cardiac arrhythmia in a 12/2000 Nature Medicine publication documenting heart rate control in atrial fibrillation after atrioventricular nodal gene transfer of Gαi2.  More recently, the lab demonstrated complete elimination of post-myocardial infarction ventricular arrhythmias(Nature Medicine 12/2006) and reduction in atrial fibrillation vulnerability in porcine disease models after potassium channel and connexin gene transfer.  Ongoing interests include the investigation of mechanisms for ischemic and post-infarct ventricular arrhythmias and chronic atrial fibrillation, the development of improved gene delivery methods, and the use of these methods for arrhythmia gene therapy.