After four years of leadership and dedicated service as director of the Duke Anesthesiology Clinical Research Unit (CRU), it is with profound appreciation that we announce Kamrouz Ghadimi, MD, MHSc, is stepping down from this position. Anne Cherry, MD, and Lisa Einhorn, MD, MHSc, have been appointed as co-directors of the unit, effective February 1.
"I am profoundly grateful to my colleagues, collaborators, and staff whose dedication, expertise, and shared commitment made so many accomplishments possible," says Dr. Ghadimi, associate professor of anesthesiology.
CRUs are the operating business units responsible for the integrity, quality and academic productivity of clinical research studies. As the director, Dr. Ghadimi operationalized the multitude of prospective and retrospective protocols to advance the fields of perioperative medicine, intensive care, pain management, neurocognition, and cardiovascular health. Key accomplishments under his leadership include increasing the CRU prospective study portfolio by nearly two-fold, promoting CRU staff retention by focusing on career development, creating a continuing education forum, implementation of prospective study dashboards and artificial intelligence to improve daily workflow efficiency, and the expansion of our unit's Human Biorepository, now housing more than 100,000 biospecimens for translational discovery. At the health system level, Dr. Ghadimi championed the use of affordable high-impact research platforms such as the Protected Research Compute Cluster to provide broad access for faculty and learners.
Dr. Ghadimi joined our faculty in 2014 and was appointed CRU director in 2022 after serving six months as assistant director. Among his scientific contributions, Dr. Ghadimi led the landmark INSPIRE-FLO clinical trial that found two common inhaled pulmonary vasodilators were similarly effective for improving outcomes in patients undergoing heart and lung surgery, and was the Duke site principal investigator (PI) for the groundbreaking FARES-II multicenter trial that established the superiority of prothrombin complex concentrates over plasma for managing bleeding in adult cardiac surgery patients.
Duke Anesthesiology alumnae, Drs. Cherry and Einhorn, bring a combined 23 years of experience. Dr. Cherry, assistant director of our CRU since 2022, focuses on advancing faculty-trainee research initiatives and individually, on prediction of renal and cardiovascular outcomes in cardiac surgical patients. Nationally, she serves as chair of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists' Research Committee and is actively involved in enhancing clinician-researcher access to and use of multicenter data sets. Dr. Einhorn, director and PI of the NIH-funded Pediatric Pain and Analgesic Trials Laboratory, is nationally recognized for her leadership in multicenter clinical trials. Her work has meaningfully advanced the field of postoperative analgesia and outcomes in children, notably launching the first-ever study investigating the potential benefits of intraoperative methadone for children undergoing outpatient surgery.
Please join us in extending our sincere appreciation to Dr. Ghadimi and congratulating him on his upcoming leadership role as chair of the Surgical Critical Care Division at Cleveland Clinic, as well as congratulating Drs. Cherry and Einhorn on their new roles within the department.