Stetten Lecture on ‘Rethinking General Anesthesia,’ Nov. 18
Photo: PICOWER INSTITUTE
The 2020 DeWitt Stetten Jr. Lecture on “Rethinking General Anesthesia” will be given by Dr. Emery N. Brown on Wednesday, Nov. 18 from 3 to 4 p.m. via https://videocast.nih.gov/ and Webex.
Doctors have employed general anesthesia for more than 165 years in the United States, and more than 100,000 Americans receive this medical treatment each day for surgery. Still, how anesthetic drugs work has long remained a mystery. New insights on general anesthesia will be the focus of Brown’s talk.
He is the Warren M. Zapol professor of anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Edward Hood Taplin professor of medical engineering and of computational neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a practicing MGH anesthesiologist whose research has helped explain how anesthetic drugs act in the brain. These discoveries have led to new ways of monitoring patients’ brain states during general anesthesia, as well as strategies for drug dosing and precisely controlling the anesthetic state.
Brown has also developed signal-processing algorithms and statistical methods that characterize the dynamic properties of neuroscience data. Long-term goals of his research include establishing a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia and developing safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs and better methods for measuring depth of anesthesia.
NIGMS began supporting Brown’s work in 1996. He has also received funding from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging and the Office of the Director.
The annual Stetten Lecture was established in 1982 in honor of NIGMS’s third director. It is open to all who are interested. Those who require sign language interpretation or other reasonable accommodation to participate should contact WALSoffice@od.nih.gov (or the Federal Relay, 1-800-877-8339) 5 days before the lecture.
For more information, visit https://www.nigms.nih.gov/News/meetings/Pages/2020-stetten-lecture-rethinking-general-anesthesia.aspx.