SleepTalker June 2021

SleepTalker
Volume 35 Number 6 Stony Brook, NY  <       June 2021       > 
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Visiting Professor Orientation Kudos Medical Student Grads
Dental Anesthesiology Chief Residents Family News Anesthesia Tech News Twitter
New Publications Synaptic Communication Where on Campus is That? Monthly Muscle Chillaxant
Visiting Professor Michel Struys, MD, PhD, FRCA

James P. Dilger, PhD

   We are pleased to welcome Michel Struys, MD, PhD, FRCA as this month's Visiting Professor. Dr. Struys is the Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He studied Medicine, Anesthesiology and Medical Science (PhD) at the University of Ghent in Belgium, his native country. After his Anesthesia Residency in Ghent, he remained at the University from 1999-2008, serving as Adjoint-chef de clinique and Chef de clinique. Dr. Struys was also a Professor in Clinical Pharmacology at the Heymans Institute of Pharmacology in Ghent. In 2008, he moved to Groningen to assume the Chair, the position he currently serves in. He has maintained ties with the University of Ghent.

   Dr. Struys epitomizes the academic anesthesiologist. His PhD thesis, “het optimaliseren van de toediening van anesthetica-hypnotica tijdens anesthesie en sedatie” (The optimization of anesthetic-hypnotic drugs during anesthesia and sedation), set the tone for his extensive research in target-controlled anesthetic administration. He has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers and is an author of just as many scientific abstracts. In 2019, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from The International Society of Anaesthetic Pharmacology honoring his important contributions to the field.

   Dr. Struys has been associated with the British Journal of Anaesthesia since 2003 and now serves as its Director and Trustee. He is an Associate Editor for Anesthesiology. Dr. Struys has presented over 60 Visiting Professor lectures throughout the world including our department in 2000.

  On a personal note, Dr. Struys is the only person I know who has used the word floccinaucinihilipilification in the title of a paper. I thank him for this useful addition to my vocabulary!

   Dr. Struys will speak on "Drugs in Anesthesia, Anything New?" for his virtual presentation on June 9. Welcome back to Stony Brook!

CA1, DA1 Orientation

CA1 DA1 Orientation
Kudos

Srinivas Pentyala, PhD

   Dr. Rebecca Monastero is the recipient of American Academy of Neurology 2021 Medical Student Prize for Excellence in Neurology. This award is given to one senior medical school student from each medical school who demonstrates promising career potential in neurology. Recipients of this award exemplify outstanding scientific achievement and clinical acumen in neurology or neuroscience as well as personal qualities of integrity, compassion, and leadership. Rebecca recently graduated from the Stony Brook School of Medicine with MD in the Scholarly Concentration Program. She attended SARAS as a high school student, was valedictorian of her high school class, and was selected into Stony Brook's highly coveted 8-year BS/MD program. Rebecca started working in my lab when she joined Stony Brook University as an undergrad student. She worked on translational research projects and published several papers. Rebecca matched into our highly selective Neurology Residency program this year, and will start her next phase of clinical training as Neurology Resident this month. She plans to continue working with me by training students in the lab, and assisting at the annual SARAS program, as she has done in past 6 years. Kudos to Dr. Monastero! We wish her the very best!

Medical Student Graduates
Joy Schabel, MD

   I had the pleasure of attending the SOM graduation. We have 4 Stony Brook SOM grads joining our department as residents this July. Left to right: Adam Bindelglass, Justin Bell, me, Joe Fiola and Xin Chen. Welcome!

2021 SOM grads
Dental Anesthesiology Chief Residents
Ralph Epstein, DDS

   It is my pleasure to announce that Dr. Benny Statman and Dr. Sarah Lee have been chosen as the Dental Anesthesiology Chief Residents for the upcoming academic year 2021-2022.
2021-22 Dental Chief Residents
Family News

Ursula Landman, DO

  Matthew graduated SUNY Albany Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts East Asian Studies. Sarah completed her freshman year at SUNY Binghamton Dean's list. She is Pre-Med and looking forward to shadowing. William continues to write for the Sci-fi show Raised by Wolves on HBOMax. We are so so proud of all their accomplishments!


Tazeen Beg, MD

   Our daughter Amber graduated from Boston University with a major in Anthropology. She plans to pursue a Master's in Public Health.

Anesthesia Technician News

Melissa A. Day, MS, CRNA, CCRN

   Please join me in welcoming Blanca Ortega-Herrera, Anesthesia Technician to our Anesthesia Technician Team. Blanca joins us with over 5 years Anesthesia Technician experience working at a busy academic center. She started working with us in the main operating room May 3, 2021.

   Welcome to our Anesthesia Technician Team Blanca!!!

Stony Brook Anesthesiology Twitter

Ramanjot S. Kang, MD

  We now have a Twitter page! Follow our new Stony Brook Department of Anesthesiology Twitter account @stonybrookanes

  Stay up to date on department news, new research, upcoming events, and everything else! To setup your own Twitter account go to: twitter.com/signup

  Have your posts featured on any of our social media accounts by using the #SBAnesthesia

New Publications

Synaptic Communication

James P Dilger, PhD

   Two, random, publication-rated things from the past few weeks.

   1. I am not an active participant in social media. Granted, I do have twitter and instagram accounts (and follow our department's activity on them), but I seldom post anything. Facebook - no thanks! But I am present on ResearchGate (Facebook for scientists?). They graciously post for me whenever I publish a paper or abstract and also stroke my ego by sending me an email notifying me of any citations of my papers. Usually, I glance at the email and say "that's nice" and promptly delete it. The other day, however, I did a double-take when I read that I was cited by this paper:
Stochasticity Versus Determinacy in Neurobiology: From Ion Channels to the Question of the Free Will

   I don't remember writing anything about free will since the philosophy class I took as an undergrad. It turns out that the author used (with publisher's permission) a figure showing ion channel activity from a paper I'd published in 1991! Wow! I just had to tell one of my co-authors about it. Namely, David Poppers, older brother of our own Jeremy Poppers, and son of our Founding Chairman Paul Poppers! David did a project in my lab as a high school student and contributed to this paper.

   2. I usually have good things to say about Google (not just because my son-in-law works for them). But I recently made an exception. As an editor of BMC Anesthesiology, I was asked to edit a manuscript that they received. The authors had done a retrospective study to compare the number of citations of various anesthetic drugs in PubMed, compared to Google. Although I could easily think of a dozen reasons why I wouldn't like the manuscript just based on the abstract, I agreed to edit it. I was pleased to see that the authors used some advanced Google search tools, namely that the webpage had to have the name of an anesthetic in its title, that the article had to be in English, and it had to be published within a certain 5-year period. I decided to repeat one of their searches: “allintitle: Midazolam”, during 1983-1987, English pages. I got ten hits, which agreed with the number given in one of the manuscript's tables. So far, so good! But I took a closer look. Those of you who are old enough will probably recognize that this time period predates wide access to the internet. The authors do note this. So, just what are these hits? Well, they are all scientific articles, of course! Two of the hits referred to the same article, posted in two different places. One article was in German (I suppose springer.com is considered an English "page" by Google). One article was from 2019 (beats me)! At the bottom of the search page, Google says:
repeat the search with the omitted results included

   Inclusion of the omitted results produced a total of 95 hits!

   My conclusion was that a) Google includes PubMed indexed articles (you already knew that, I'm sure), b) the same article may be found at more than one url (not a surprise either), c) the language filter is not perfect, d) the time period filter is not perfect, e) the top ten hits is not the extent of the googleverse (as a teenager I knew that the 10 ten hits was not the extent of the musicverse). Given these limitations, I could not trust anything presented in the manuscript, so I rejected it without further review.

Where on Campus is That?

James P. Dilger, PhD


Monthly Muscle Chillaxant
Happy birthday Marjorie Lundgren and Diane Bogdan
Happy Birthday to Marjorie Lundgren and Diane Bogdan

SleepTalker, the Stony Brook Anesthesiology Newsletter is published by the Department of Anesthesiology
Stony Brook Medicine, Stony Brook, NY
Tong Joo Gan, M.D., MHS, FRCA, MBA, Chairman
Editorial Board: James P. Dilger, Ph.D.; Stephen A. Vitkun, M.D., M.B.A., Ph.D.; Marisa Barone-Citrano, M.A.; Ramanjot S. Kang, M.D.