Albert Starr (born June 1, 1926) is an American cardiovascular surgeon and inventor of the Starr heart valve. Starr resides and practices in the Portland, Oregon area and is special adviser to OHSU Dean of Medicine Mark Richardson and OHSU President Joseph Robertson (OHSU) at Oregon Health and Science University. [1]
Starr was born in New York, New York on June 1, 1926. [2] He received his B.A. degree from Columbia College (now Columbia University) in 1946 and his M.D. degree from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1949. He then went on to do his internship at Johns Hopkins Hospital and his residency in general and thoracic surgery at the Bellevue and Presbyterian Hospitals of Columbia University. He was an assistant in surgeon at Columbia University until 1957, when he moved to Oregon—having been enticed, in part, by the Oregon Heart Association's promises to help fund his research and to take him salmon fishing. There he worked for the Crippled Children's Division at the University of Oregon Medical School (now the Oregon Health and Science University). Starr was an instructor in surgery when he met Lowell Edwards in September 1958. Starr has said of this meeting, "He was in his 60s and I was in my 30s, but there was no generation gap between us."
Starr helped invent the world's first durable artificial mitral valve [3] and is credited with being a co-inventor of the world's first artificial heart valve in 1960. [4]
Michael Ellis DeBakey was an American general and cardiovascular surgeon, scientist and medical educator who became Chairman of the Department of Surgery, President, and Chancellor of Baylor College of Medicine at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas. His career spanned nearly eight decades.
Donald Pearce Shiley was the inventor of the Bjork–Shiley valve, a prosthetic heart valve. He was a 1951 alumnus of the University of Portland, where he studied engineering.
Denton Arthur Cooley was an American cardiothoracic surgeon famous for performing the first implantation of a total artificial heart. Cooley was also the founder and surgeon in-chief of The Texas Heart Institute, chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at clinical partner Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, consultant in Cardiovascular Surgery at Texas Children's Hospital and a clinical professor of Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Clarence Walton Lillehei, was an American surgeon who pioneered open-heart surgery, as well as numerous techniques, equipment and prostheses for cardiothoracic surgery.
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is a public research university focusing primarily on health sciences with a main campus, including two hospitals, in Portland, Oregon. The institution was founded in 1887 as the University of Oregon Medical Department and later became the University of Oregon Medical School. In 1974, the campus became an independent, self-governed institution called the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, combining state dentistry, medicine, nursing, and public health programs into a single center. It was renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981 and took its current name in 2001, as part of a merger with the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), in Hillsboro. The university has several partnership programs including a joint PharmD Pharmacy program with Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov, Doctor of Science, Professor, also known as Mykola Mykhailovych Amosov was a Soviet and Ukrainian doctor of Russian origin, heart surgeon, inventor, best-selling author, and exercise enthusiast, known for his inventions of several surgical procedures for treating heart defects.
Walter Randolph "Ranny" Chitwood Jr. is known for his work as a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University located in Greenville, North Carolina.
Alain Frédéric Carpentier is a French surgeon whom the President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery calls the father of modern mitral valve repair. He is most well known for the development and popularization of a number of mitral valve repair techniques. In 1996, he performed the first minimally invasive mitral valve repair in the world and in 1998 he performed the first robotic mitral valve repair with the DaVinci robot prototype. He is the recipient of the 2007 Lasker Prize.
Doernbecher Children's Hospital is an academic teaching children's hospital associated with Oregon Health & Science University located in Portland, Oregon. Established in 1926, it is the first full-service children's hospital in the Pacific Northwest, and provides full-spectrum pediatric care. Doernbecher Children's hospital is consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the United States' top pediatric hospitals in multiple medical specialties.
David H. Adams is an American cardiac surgeon and the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Dr. Adams is a recognized leader in the field of heart valve surgery and mitral valve reconstruction. As director of Mount Sinai Mitral Valve Repair Center, he has set national benchmarks with >99% degenerative mitral valve repair rates, while running one of the largest valve repair programs in the United States. Dr. Adams is the co-inventor of 2 mitral valve annuloplasty repair rings – the Carpentier-McCarthy-Adams IMR ETlogix Ring and the Carpentier-Edwards Physio II Annuloplasty Ring, and is a senior consultant with royalty agreements with Edwards Lifesciences. He is also the inventor of the Tri-Ad Adams Tricuspid Annuloplasty ring with a royalty agreement with Medtronic. He is a co-author with Professor Alain Carpentier of the benchmark textbook in mitral valve surgery Carpentier's Reconstructive Valve Surgery. He is also the National Co-Principal Investigator of the FDA pivotal trial of the Medtronic-CoreValve transcatheter aortic valve replacement device.
Oregon Health & Science University Hospital is a 576-bed teaching hospital, biomedical research facility, and Level I trauma center located on the campus of Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. OHSU hospital has consistently been ranked by the U.S. News & World Report as the #1 hospital in the Portland metro regional area and is frequently ranked nationally in multiple medical specialties.
Adrian Kantrowitz was an American cardiac surgeon whose team performed the world's second heart transplant attempt at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York on December 6, 1967. The infant lived for only six hours. At a press conference afterwards, Kantrowitz emphasized that he considered the operation to have been a failure.
Robert E. Michler is an American heart surgeon specializing in heart surgery, aortic and mitral valve repair, coronary artery bypass surgery, aneurysm surgery, and management of the failing heart. In 2017, Michler received the Vladimir Borakovsky Prize in Moscow from the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation for “his personal contributions to the development of cardiovascular surgery”.
Brian J. Druker, M.D. is a physician-scientist at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), in Portland, Oregon. He is the chief executive officer of OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research, Associate Dean for Oncology in the OHSU School of Medicine, and professor of medicine.
Gilles Dreyfus is a French cardiac surgeon.
Edwards Lifesciences is an American medical technology company headquartered in Irvine, California, specializing in artificial heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring. It developed the SAPIEN transcatheter aortic heart valve made of cow tissue within a balloon-expandable, cobalt-chromium frame, deployed via catheter. The company has manufacturing facilities at the Irvine headquarters, as well as in Draper, Utah; Costa Rica; the Dominican Republic; Puerto Rico; and Singapore; and is building a new facility due to be completed in 2021 in Limerick, Ireland.
Dr R Ravi Kumar is an Indian heart surgeon, and a pioneer in robot-assisted heart surgery.
Nina Starr Braunwald was an American thoracic surgeon and medical researcher who was among the first women to perform open-heart surgery. She was also the first woman to be certified by the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, and the first to be elected to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. In 1960, at the age of 32, she led the operative team at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) that implanted the first successful artificial mitral human heart valve replacement, which she had designed and fabricated.
Columbia Memorial Hospital (CMH) is a 25-bed medical facility in Astoria, Oregon. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Oregon Synod. The hospital has been serving families living and visiting the North Coast and Lower Columbia Region since 1880. A critical access hospital, its services include a level IV trauma center.
Nagarur Gopinath was an Indian surgeon and one of the pioneers of cardiothoracic surgery in India. He is credited with the first successful performance of open heart surgery in India which he performed in 1962. He served as the honorary surgeon to two Presidents of India and was a recipient of the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri in 1974 and Dr. B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian medical award in 1978 from the Government of India.