Chief of largest congenital heart surgery program to speak here

Dr. Richard Jonas, chief of cardiovascular surgery at Children’s Hospital in Boston and William E. Ladd professor of child surgery at Harvard Medical School, will be the ninth annual visiting scholar in cardiothoracic surgery at the UW this week.

His visit, sponsored by the Department of Surgery’s Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, will include two presentations and participation in teaching rounds at Children’s and a program on division research.

Richard Jonas with a patien

Jonas will speak at 3:30 p.m., Friday, May 12, in room K-069 of the Health Sciences Center on “Cerebral Protection During Repair of Congenital Cardiac Anomalies: Clinical and Laboratory Studies.” The Friday afternoon lecture is open to everyone and will be followed by a reception.

On Saturday morning, May 13, the division will host a breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle. At that event, Jonas will speak on “The Fontan Procedure: Evolution of Surgical Techniques and Long-Term Outcome.” The Fontan procedure is an operation performed to help children who are born with only a single pumping chamber of the heart. For more information on this event, call Margo Boyd at 685-8644.

Jonas, who now leads the largest congenital heart surgery program in the world at Children’s Hospital in Boston, was born in Adelaide, Australia, and attended medical school at the University of Adelaide, earning his M.D. in 1974. After an internship and residency in surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, he began working in cardiac surgery at the Royal Children’s Hospital, also in Melbourne. He also spent two years in Auckland, New Zealand, before he moved to the United States in 1982 to become a clinical fellow in cardiothoracic surgery at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and a research fellow in surgery at Harvard.

He has been at Children’s Hospital since 1983 and was named Ladd Professor of Child Surgery and chief of cardiovascular surgery in 1994. He is a member of several editorial boards for surgical journals and is widely known as associate editor of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

He is also a member of the Coordinating Committee for Continuing Education in Thoracic Surgery and a member of the Senior Technical Advisory Group for Project Hope’s Shanghai Children’s Medical Center.

His research focuses on studying support techniques used during cardiac surgery to maxamize future intellectual development and minimize neurological injury to the child.