Description of Research Expertise

Lance B. Becker, MD, is a newly recruited Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously Dr. Becker was a Professor at the University of Chicago's Department of Medicine, Section of Emergency Medicine. He was the founder and Director of the Emergency Resuscitation Center at the University of Chicago in Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, an interdisciplinary team of investigators focused on understanding and treating sudden death from cardiac arrest and from traumatic injuries. He is board certified in internal medicine, emergency medicine and critical care medicine.

Dr. Becker has received numerous national awards and recognition for his work and leadership. He was selected by Emergency Medicine residents as the "Attending Physician of the Year" in 1997, has been awarded the "Time, Feeling, and Focus" award from the American Heart Association, as well as other leadership awards from the National Emergency Cardiac Care Committee of the American Heart Association. Dr. Becker was the National Conference Director for the American Heart Association's Emergency Cardiac Care Evidence Evaluation Conference in September 1999 to create new national CPR recommendations, has served on the National American Heart Association's Basic Life Support Committee and Advanced Life Support subcommittees. He has been a past Chair of the Cardiopulmonary, Perioperative, and Critical Care Council of the American Heart Association and is a past Chairman of the Basic Life Support Committee. He has served as representative to the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation and helped create and continues to Co-Direct the Resuscitation Science Symposium of the American Heart Association, the leading international venue for the presentation of cutting edge science in resuscitation. At the most recent 2005 International AHA Guidelines Conference for consensus on international resuscitation science and new CPR recommendations, he acted as the Chair for the daily "Controversial Topics" sessions that revisited the most challenging resuscitation topics each day. Dr. Becker has worked closely with the NIH as a reviewer, grantee, and in a leadership role as a the Chair of the Myocardial Protection Working group for the NIH NHLBI's sponsored PULSE Conference and PULSE Leadership Group, which is dedicated to support of research funding in resuscitation research. He also served as a member of the Food and Drug Administration Device Evaluation panels and has appeared before the FDA panels as an expert presenter.

Dr. Becker' research interests are very translational and extend across the basic science laboratory into animal models of resuscitation, and to human therapies. He developed the Emergency Resuscitation Center at the University of Chicago to bring investigators from diverse fields together for multidisciplinary resuscitation research and for improved training of young resuscitation scientists. His cellular studies have helped define cellular reperfusion injury mechanisms, mitochondrial oxidant generation, reactive oxygen and nitrogen species responses to ischemia, apoptotic activation following ischemia, signaling pathways, new cellular cytoprotective strategies, and hypothermia protection. Additional studies are ongoing on development of novel human coolants for rapid induction of hypothermia, inflammatory pathways activated following shock and cardiac arrest, improving the quality of CPR, new defibrillator and cardiopulmonary bypass technologies, epidemiology of sudden death, and novel treatments for cardiac arrest.