Page 38 - CBAC Newsletter 2016
P. 38
CBAC Research Fellow
Spotlight
Matthew Schill, M.D. Ihave been a research fellow in Dr. Ralph
Damiano’s laboratory for ten months. I work
Research Fellow on several projects. Our laboratory’s research
currently centers on investigating the patho-
Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery physiology of atrial fibrillation that develops in
Department of Surgery patients with mitral regurgitation. My primary
Ralph Damiano Laboratory project involves examining patients referred for
mitral valve repair with electrocardiographic
Cardiac Surgery imaging (ECGI) before and after surgery. Some
of these patients have atrial fibrillation, and
34 | CBAC Center Heartbeat they are treated with a Cox-Maze IV procedure
as well. I am looking for differences in these
patients’ atrial conduction patterns before and
after surgery. We are also studying the onset of
atrial arrhythmias associated with mitral
regurgitation in a large animal model. Finally,
the Washington University cardiac surgeons
have vast experience with surgery for atrial
arrhythmias, and our laboratory is actively
engaged in clinical outcomes research in this
patient population.
Background
It may be a cliché, but I’ve always enjoyed
science and working with my hands, and I
wanted to help people. The first thing that I
did that was anything like surgery was building
electronics. I was messing with circuits and
computers from a very young age. I think that
gave me an appreciation for fine technical work
and for the art of fine-tuning a complex system.
I became interested in medicine as a teenager.
For me, medicine is a way to solve interesting
problems while having an immediate impact on
people’s lives – there’s nothing else like it.
I think the moment I knew that surgery was the
right discipline for me came when I was an
undergraduate. I was working in a nephrolo-
gist’s laboratory, and one of my projects was
developing a mouse model of acute kidney injury
to see if there was a phenotype for a gene they
