The Department of Anesthesiology is pleased to announce that Dr. Michael Avidan has accepted the position of head of the Department of Anesthesiology, effective July 1. Michael Avidan is currently the Dr. Seymour and Rose T. Brown Professor of Anesthesiology, as well as Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery, at Washington University School of Medicine. He is the founding director of the Anesthesiology Department’s Infrastructure for Quality Improvement, Research, and Informatics; he serves as the co-director of the Anesthesiology T32 postdoctoral training program; and he is the director of the Division of Clinical and Translational Research in the Department of Anesthesiology. Prior to joining Washington University in 2001, Dr. Avidan trained as an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and at King’s College Hospital in the United Kingdom.
Today Dr. Avidan is an internationally recognized anesthesiologist and researcher who has authored more than 190 publications, including seminal work published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, Science, British Journal of Anaesthesia and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His work has been funded by diverse and prominent agencies, including the National Science Foundation, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and National Institutes of Health. He has been invited to lecture internationally on the topics of intraoperative awareness, postoperative neurocognitive disorders, pragmatic clinical trials, and research methodology. Dr. Avidan is currently president of the Association of University Anesthesiologists and a member of the Board of Trustees for the International Anesthesia Research Society, the two most prominent international societies supporting academic anesthesiology. He is an editor of one of the world’s leading anesthesiology journals: the British Journal of Anaesthesia. As an acknowledged expert in research methodology, he is an invited Affiliate of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford.
Dr. Avidan is at present an active cardiothoracic anesthesiologist and intensivist, and from 2006 to 2017 he was the chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology. He recently established a machine-learning enhanced telemedicine ‘Control Tower’ system, to augment the quality and safety of perioperative care. Dr. Avidan is also a dedicated educator, whose commitment to training and mentorship has been recognized with awards from the Department of Anesthesiology, Department of Surgery, School of Medicine, and the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences. He is a member of the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research mentors’ academy. He was a consultant for the establishment of the Early Stage Anesthesiology Scholars’ organization, and now serves on its Advisory Council.
On behalf of the Department, congratulations to Dr. Avidan!