Dr. Dean Andropoulos is the recipient of the 2024 Congenital Cardiac Anesthesia Society (CCAS) Lifetime Achievement Award
Myron Yaster MD
One of the seminal events in the history of the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia occurred 20 years ago when Dr. Dean Andropoulos and a group of his colleagues realized that there was a need for a new subspecialty Society devoted to pediatric cardiac anesthesia. Once this Rubicon was crossed, they had an incredib.ly important decision to make: should they completely break away from SPA and form their own independent Society or form a Society within SPA for pediatric cardiac anesthesiologists? Dean spearheaded the decision to not only form a new subspecialty society, the Congenital Cardiac Anesthesia Society (CCAS) but to keep it under the SPA umbrella. This crucial decision strengthened both Societies. Instead of having a splintered Society of several hundred members it increased and empowered a combined Society of several thousand members. The rest as they say is history and we are all so lucky to have had Dean at the helm when this decision was made. I am just sooo happy that he is receiving this award today and would encourage all of you attending the meeting to congratulate him!
For those unfortunate few of you who do not know Dean or his many accomplishments, I am copying his “official” biosketch from the Texas Children’s website.
Dean Arndropoulos, M.D., M.H.C.M. is Anesthesiologist-in-Chief, and Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Anesthesiology and Pediatrics, and Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs in the Department of Anesthesiology at Baylor College of Medicine.
He received his M.D. degree from the University of California, San Diego, and completed Pediatrics and Anesthesiology residencies at the University of California, San Francisco. He also earned a Master’s Degree in Healthcare Management from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Andropoulos leads a department of more than 120 fellowship trained and Board Certified Pediatric Anesthesiologists, 35 certified registered nurse anesthetists, 20 fellows and residents, and 20 pediatric nurse practitioners performing more than 55,000 anesthetics annually ranging from simple outpatient surgeries, to complex cardiac and neurosurgical cases. Texas Children’s Department of Anesthesiology is a national leader in clinical care, safety and quality, education and research.
Dr. Andropoulos is the editor of two textbooks: Anesthesia for Congenital Heart Disease, 4th Edition, published 2023, where he serves as Editor in Chief, along with other Texas Children’s physicians. He is also the co-editor of Gregory’s Pediatric Anesthesia, 6th Edition, published in 2020. Dr. Andropoulos is also the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, and 50 textbook chapters relating to pediatric anesthetic research and clinical care. His research interests include neurological outcomes and brain protection for infant cardiac surgery, and clinical studies of anesthetic neurotoxicity.
Dr. Andropoulos has had research funding from the National Institutes of Health and has been co-principal investigator for the Texas Children’s Hospital/BCM Pediatric Heart Network Core Clinical Center – a National Institutes of Health funded clinical research network. Dr. Andropoulos is also the principal investigator for the Dexmedetomidine Study of the Pediatric Heart Network, investigating a new anesthetic technique for infant cardiac surgery. Nationally, Dr. Andropoulos is founding director and first President of the Congenital Cardiac Anesthesia Society which now has more than 600 members devoted to clinical care, education, and training. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia, and has been the President/CEO of the Pediatric Anesthesia Leadership Council. He also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board and is the Medical Officer of the SmartTots organization, a public private partnership of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the International Anesthesia Research Society.