John Puskas

Key takeaways

John Puskas belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect John Puskas to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of John Puskas from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

John D. Puskas is an American researcher, author, inventor and cardiovascular surgeon. As of 2022, he is Professor, Cardiovascular Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and chairman, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Mount Sinai Morningside, Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Mount Sinai West. He holds 11 U.S. patents and co-founded the International Coronary Congress and the International Society for Coronary Artery Surgery. He is credited by ResearchGate with 330 publications and 15,234 citations and as of 2022 Scopus reports an h-index of 62. Puskas is known for advancing coronary artery bypass (CABG) surgery by refining surgical techniques for all-arterial, off-pump CABG and inventing finer instruments to be used for advanced coronary bypass surgical procedures. He is credited with performing the first totally thoracoscopic bilateral pulmonary vein isolation procedure. He is the co-editor of State of the Art Surgical Coronary Revascularization, the first textbook solely devoted to coronary artery surgery. In 2021, Puskas ran the New York City Marathon with his patient who, in 2018, suffered cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for five minutes, but recovered after all-arterial CABG. Their trainer, John Garlepp was another CABG patient of Puskas.

Career

Life and education Born in 1960, Puskas received his MD at Harvard Medical School in 1986 and in 1991, a Master of Science in Surgical Science (MSc) at the University of Toronto. Post-graduate training included a general surgery internship and residency, department of surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital; fellowship in cardiothoracic surgery at Emory University Hospitals, Atlanta, a lung transplantation research fellowship, division of thoracic surgery, Toronto General Hospital; and an advanced fellowship in tracheal surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Division of General Thoracic Surgery.

Research Puskas research concentrations include arterial bypass grafting, robotic and hybrid coronary bypass grafting, novel designs and materials for artificial heart valves, mitral and aortic valve repair and replacement, surgical and medical treatments for people with atrial fibrillation and surgical instruments for adult cardiac surgery. He founded the Emory University Cardiothoracic Clinical Research Unit in 2005 and was a founding investigator in the creation of the NIH Cardiothoracic Surgery Trials Network in 2007; he has served on the steering committee of that NIH Network since that time. As of 2022, he has served as the principal investigator (PI) of five multi-center FDA investigatory drug/device exemption trials in cardiovascular surgery. At Mount Sinai Health System, he founded and directs the Cardiovascular Clinical Research Unit at Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospitals to create a multidisciplinary collaborative clinical research infrastructure allowing clinical cardiologists and surgeons to enroll patients in multiple trials. He led 47 clinical sites nationwide to conduct the first RCT of hybrid coronary revascularization. He is listed on NIH RePORTER with 12 NHLBI PI roles.

Clinical and practice Puskas performs cardiovascular surgical procedures including all-arterial coronary bypass grafting, minimally invasive robotic coronary bypass surgery, hybrid coronary revascularization, off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery, ablation surgery for the treatment of atrial fibrillation, mitral valve repair/replacement, aortic valve replacement, valve-sparing aortic root replacement and surgery for aortic dissection. He performed the first triple off-pump bypass surgery using minimally invasive coronary artery bypass graft instrumentation in 1997. Between 1996 and 2022, he performed approximately 300 cardiac surgical cases annually, specializing in multiple arterial CABG and robotic CABG. In 2019, Puskas, with Gianluca Torregrossa, MD, successfully performed two totally endoscopic coronary arterial bypass surgeries (TECABs) making Mount Sinai the only New York State health system qualified to make the procedure available. As of 2022, Puskas has served as President of the International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (2009) and the International Society for Coronary Artery Surgery.

U.S. patents

Present societies International Society for Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS) Society of Thoracic Surgeons American College of Surgeons American Association for Thoracic Surgery American College of Chest Physicians American College of Cardiology *Present indicates 2022

Publications

Editorial As of 2022, Puskas is a reviewer and editorial contributor to nine journals, including The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Heart Surgery Forum, The Lancet, The Journal of Cardiac Surgery, Circulation, Innovations, American College of Cardiology, European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Peer reviewed PubMed lists 320 publications as of 2022. A short list ranked by citations include: Smith, P. K., Puskas, J. D., Ascheim, D. D., Voisine, P., Gelijns, A. C., Moskowitz, A. J., ... & Michler, R. E. (2014). Surgical treatment of moderate ischemic mitral regurgitation. New England Journal of Medicine, 371(23), 2178–2188; 273 citations Puskas, J. D., Thourani, V. H., Marshall, J. J., Dempsey, S. J., Steiner, M. A., Sammons, B. H., ... & Guyton, R. A. (2001). Clinical outcomes, angiographic patency, and resource utilization in 200 consecutive off-pump coronary bypass patients. The Annals of thoracic surgery, 71(5), 1477–1484; 324 citations Gaudino, M., Benedetto, U., Fremes, S., Biondi-Zoccai, G., Sedrakyan, A., Puskas, J. D., ... & Taggart, D. P. (2018). Radial-artery or saphenous-vein grafts in coronary-artery bypass surgery. New England Journal of Medicine, 378(22), 2069–2077; 295 citations Gillinov, A. M., Gelijns, A. C., Parides, M. K., DeRose Jr, J. J., Moskowitz, A. J., Voisine, P., ... & Argenziano, M. (2015). Surgical ablation of atrial fibrillation during mitral-valve surgery. New England Journal of Medicine, 372(15), 1399–1409; 261 citations El-Chami, M. F., Kilgo, P., Thourani, V., Lattouf, O. M., Delurgio, D. B., Guyton, R. A., ... & Puskas, J. D. (2010). New-onset atrial fibrillation predicts long-term mortality after coronary artery bypass graft. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 55(13), 1370–1376; 338 citations

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with John Puskas

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what John Puskas claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to John Puskas before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about John Puskas ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of John Puskas

In research: John Puskas appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses John Puskas in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: John Puskas is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 20th-century American surgeons, 21st-century American surgeons, American cardiac surgeons, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for John Puskas outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study John Puskas in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what John Puskas means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain John Puskas out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is John Puskas in simple terms?

John D. Puskas is an American researcher, author, inventor and cardiovascular surgeon.

Why does John Puskas matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study John Puskas?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on John Puskas.