Mibai Podgoreanu, M.D., Recipient of the 2009 Presidential Scholar Award

摘要

MIHAI Podgoreanu, the 2009 recipient of the Presidential Scholar Award, is a wonderful testament to the passion for discovery that should drive anesthesiology to the highest levels of modern science. Mihai obtained his M.D. degree from Carol Davila University in Bucharest, Romania and trained as an anesthesiology resident at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale, he pursued the clinician-scientist track under the mentor-ship of David Silverman, M.D., focused on understanding the origin and control mechanisms of oscillations in microvascular flow in response to various physiologic perturbations. Expanding on investigations in healthy volunteers, Dr. Podgoreanu described for the first time in cardiac surgical patients the emergence and progressive synchronization of high-frequency microvascular oscillations under conditions of nonpulsatile perfusion (during cardiopulmonary bypass) in the absence of cardiac and respiratory activity, thus demonstrating their peripheral origin and providing insights into parasympathetic vasoregulatory mechanisms in response to systemic depul-sation. This phenomenon is particularly important now with the advent of axial-flow ventricular assist devices. This work was recognized nationally in 2001, when he was named the winner of the resident research contest at the Postgraduate Assembly of the New York Society of Anesthesiologists. To expand his repertoire into animal models of disease, both ex vivo and in vivo, he participated during his residency in a project examining the effects of lidocaine on human lung fibroblasts and endothelium in a rat tracheal ring model system.