ther, and during her residency at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, she soon came to realize that anesthesiology was much more than just “keeping people asleep.” “I loved it, and the immediate nature of it. It includes a task to complete, challenges, and the necessity of realtime decision making. In the course of some operations, you will need to make hundreds of decisions that will impact patients’ lives,” she says. Finding Your Passion A lready having expressed an interest in cardiovascular surgery and, in particular, the nascent techniques of coronary bypass surgery, Dr. Mora was especially attracted to the idea of caring for these types of critical patients: “As a cardiovascular anesthesiologist, you have the mandate of being the ultimate patient advocate. You have to control, impact, and positively affect all of the physiology of your patient.” Cardiovascular anesthesiologists also are uniquely positioned to improve the safety and efficiency of cardiac OR suites, says Dr. Mora, who was involved in the implementation of the SCA’s Flawless Operative Cardiovascular Unified Systems (FOCUS) initiative, which was intended to help develop strategies to improve safety for cardiac surgery patients. “We are the professionals most likely to ‘speak’ all of the ‘dialects’ of the OR personnel—the surgeons, nurses, and perfusionists—and thus are able to provide ‘translation’ services on an ongoing basis,” she explains. An associate examiner for the American Board of Anesthesiology, Dr. Mora also has been serving as an editor, guest editor, or reviewer for a host of peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Circulation, the Journal of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesiology, the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, and Anesthesiology. She has published multiple peer-reviewed articles and has contributed to more than a dozen other articles and book chapters, as well as edited the book HeartLung Bypass: Principles and Techniques of Extracorporeal Circulation. —Continued on Page 59 Robert Wood Johnson I MEDICINE 53 COURTESY OF CHRISTINA T. MORA MANGANO, MD ’79