General Info

My overall lifetime professional educational objective is to advance cardiac surgery internationally. I am involved in many international societies and have worked for many years in the area of international education for cardiac surgery. My day to day activities center on providing the most advanced quality cardiac surgery care for our patients. This includes providing all arterial coronary bypass grafting for young patients, valve repair instead of replacement when appropriate, heart and lung transplantation, mechanical assist for the failing heart and lungs (VADs, short and long term, and ECMO), surgery for atrial fibrillation, and advanced surgery for aortic disease (dissections and aneurysms). From a research prospective, early in my career, I concentrated on study of the human inflammatory response triggered by blood/synthetic surface interactions. This developed into research into ameliorating inflammatory responses of hyperacute rejection and the neurological, pulmonary, and cardiac sequelae of ischemia reperfusion injury. Over the last decade, I have been primarily interested in device development related to cardiac surgery.