Description of Research Expertise

Jose Pascual is a clinical surgeon specialized in trauma and critical care who has a special interest in shock and head injury. His research interests are shared in basic science research where he evaluates, in vivo, through intravital microscopy the real time microcirculation of pia on live rodent brains. He seeks to learn how a variety of insults including head injury and shock affect the microcirculation and how different management strategies influence these changes. This basic science work is translated into several clinical projects both retrospective and prospective evaluating the effects of different osmotherapeutic agents in traumatic brain injured patients as well as the immunemodulating effects of different resuscitation fluids in different forms of shock.

Description of Clinical Expertise

Jose Pascual is an intensivist/surgeon at the University Of Pennsylvania, board certified in the US/Canada. He finished his fellowship in 2007 and his basic science PhD in resuscitation immunobiology, at McGill, in 2005. His thesis investigated the salutary effects of immunemodulating fluids in shock.

As faculty of Medical and Nursing Schools, Jose teaches students, residents, fellows and advance practice providers in several didactic and skills courses. However, most notable is his role as research mentor for medical, nursing and undergraduate students raising questions at the bedside and attempting to answer them through clinical or basic science research projects. In the last 5 years, Jose has mentored 23 research trainees, several of whom have won awards at national/international scientific meetings.

Jose Pascual’s research interests include Traumatic Brain Injury, shock and ICU education through simulation and patient safety initiatives. His TBI laboratory studies immune responses to injury through intravital microscopy of the cerebral microcirculation investigating the role of the neutrophil in injury and shock.

Jose has launched several ICU educational initiatives using simulation integrated within the ICU to teach day-to-day emergent event management by the multidisciplinary team (NPs, MDs, nurses, pharmacists) through learning from errors or near misses. Initiatives relating to videorecorded simulator-generated or real emergent events have been integrated in ICU Quality Improvement efforts and also published.