Peter Yanke

I pursued dual training in anesthesia and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins and the University of Utah. During my Pediatric Anesthesia fellowship at Johns Hopkins, I was able to spend 40% of my clinical time doing cardiac anesthesia for children with congenital heart disease. I then returned to complete my training in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine (PCCM) here at the University of Utah. This latter fellowship had a heavy emphasis on the perioperative care of children with congenital heart disease (CHD). Throughout my training, I found myself most attracted to the care of patients with CHD, both in the operating room (OR) and in the intensive care unit following their surgeries. This both provided the background and set the stage for the sub-specialization that occurred in my career over the following almost twenty years. Beginning in 2000, a decision was made to focus our peri-operative care of children with CHD via sub-specialization within the fields of anesthesia and critical care. Specifically, this meant that a small group of individuals would devote their clinical time to the care of patients with CHD. With a small group of physicians involved, the exposure to rare forms of CHD would be maximized and, thus, care would be optimized. In the OR, five anesthesiologists were chosen to provide the anesthesia for cardiac procedures. This number was chosen carefully to ensure a minimum number of cardiopulmonary bypass cases per anesthesiologist per year. Shortly after this, I was asked to be one of five cardiac intensivists, and by 2001, a Cardiac ICU (CICU) was born. This finally allowed me to focus care on the patients that interested me the most, from the operating room to the intensive care unit afterwards. Soon after this, I was named Head of the Division of Cardiac Anesthesia and continue to serve in that position to the present time. In brief, over the last 30+ years, these groups have thrived and our peri-operative care of these complex children has expanded both in the OR and ICU. We now have a 16 bed CICU and deliver over 700 cardiac anesthetics per year.

Dr. Thomas Higgins holds the Richard L. Stimson Presidential Endowed Chair in Orthopaedic Surgery and is a Professor and Chief of Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery at the University of Utah. His medical degree was completed at Brown University School of Medicine. His orthopaedic training was at Yale University, with a post-graduate fellowship in orthopaedic trauma at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. He has been on the faculty at University of Utah since 2000. Dr. Higgins’ clinical expertise is in the treatment of complex intra-articular injuries, pelvic and acetabular trauma, and musculoskeletal care in the setting of polytrauma. His elective practice focuses on the deformity correction, malunions, and nonunions. The author of over one hundred peer-reviewed publications and multiple book chapters, Dr. Higgins’ main area of research interest clinically has been on plateau fractures. He has been primary investigator or co-investigator on four OTA grants, two AO grants, and an OREF grant. His most recent research has focused on the genetics of trauma, the use of opiate analgesics in the trauma setting, and the role of inflammatory mediators in the formation of post-traumatic osteoarthritis. He was recently awarded a $2.5 million dollar DOD grant for a prospective randomized clinical trial on the role of NSAIDs in fracture healing. In the educational sphere, Dr. Higgins is recognized nationally for his research and presentations of tibial plateau fractures. He has been active with orthopaedic education with AO North America, chairing three courses, and teaching at over thirty. Previously a member of the OTA Education Committee, he has also chaired multiple resident courses for the OTA. He has received the annual teaching award three times at the University of Utah. He has previously served on the Orthopaedic Trauma Association Board of Directors, and currently serves as the OTA Second President-elect. Dr. Higgins was the OTA Annual Program Chair in 2013 and 2014. In 2009, Dr. Higgins served as the OTA/AAOS Landstuhl Visiting Scholar in Germany and has been visiting professor at multiple universities. In 2015 he and his family spent four months serving at Kijabe Hospital in Kenya, and he served as a visiting surgeon with Health Volunteers Overseas at the Jigme Dorji Wangchuck National Referral Hospital in Thimphu, Bhutan for the month of January 2020. He has also served twice at the Haiti Adventist Hospital in Carrefour, Haiti. He maintains an interest in continuing to serve in global medicine. When he is not working, he enjoys skiing, biking, and traveling with his wife and kids.

Dr. Gesteland is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. Dr. Gesteland completed his medical school training at the University of Utah in 1996 and his combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency training at the University of Minnesota in 2000. He completed his medical informatics training at the University of Utah as a Fellow in The National Library of Medicine’s University-based Medical Informatics Training Program in 2002. The subject of Dr. Gesteland’s Master’s of Science dissertation work was the rapid deployment and evaluation of a real-time disease outbreak detection system for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. As a fellow of Intermountain Healthcare’s Institute of Healthcare Delivery Research and later as a member of the inaugural class of Pediatric Clinical and Translational Research Scholars in the Department of Pediatrics, he built upon his thesis work to create a novel infectious disease situational awareness program for state of Utah. The program, called GermWatch, has become an invaluable resource for public health, caregivers, hospital administrators, researchers and the communities of Utah. Dr. Gesteland has a breadth of clinical experience including 20 years of adult and pediatric urgent care and 16 years of pediatric hospital medicine. He is a practicing clinician working as an academic Hospitalist at Intermountain Healthcare’s Primary Children's Hospital since 2004, where he cares for a wide variety of acuity and complexity, from healthy infants with fever to children with multiple complex chronic conditions who have recently had major surgery. Dr. Gesteland’s research interests and expertise encompasses clinical information systems, health information technology, natural language processing, machine-learning, biosurveillance, health services research and clinical decision support. He has over 40 publications in peer-reviewed journals relating to these topics. His current research focus is in furthering the development and deployment of probabilistic and interoperable methods for disease surveillance, forecasting, mitigation and response. Dr. Gesteland has been the Principle Investigator or Co-Investigator on grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, the University of Utah’s Center for Translational Science, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Library of Medicine.