As Chair of the SOCCA Research Committee, I am thrilled to share our latest progress and upcoming initiatives. Over the past months, our committee has been energized by the dedication and enthusiasm of our members, whose collaborative efforts have resulted in significant advancements in the field of critical care anesthesiology.

As Chair of the Research Committee, I am thrilled and privileged to share with you the notable progress we’ve made in recent months. With the support and guidance of the Board we have grown our membership, been focused on deliverable products for our membership, and continued to increase the visibility and contribution of the committee to SOCCA and the wider community.

The optimal storage temperature of transfused platelets for surgical and traumatic hemorrhage remains controversial. Standard practice since 1969 has been to transfuse platelets at room temperature (22^o). This practice is based on decades old research demonstrating that platelets are removed from the circulation more quickly when stored at 4^o than platelets at room temperature.¹ Since the most common indication for platelet transfusion is thrombocytopenia due to oncologic disorders in order to prevent bleeding, the increase in circulatory time with room temperature platelets was preferred.

I am an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colorado, where I attend in the operating rooms and the Surgical Trauma ICU (STICU). Throughout my early career as a physician-scientist, I have been dedicated to studying critically ill patients, trauma, and multi-organ dysfunction.

I was exposed to research early in my training as an anesthesiology resident at the University of Maryland in the late 1990s, where I had the fortune of training with Dr. Jane Matjasko, our department chair. As a pioneer in neuroanesthesia, she worked diligently to understand the complexities of anesthetic effects on the brain. She was one of the inaugural members of SNACC (Society of Neuroscience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care) and among the first graduates of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University). She inspired me to become an academic anesthesiologist who was passionate not only about patient care but also about asking questions, being industrious, and finding the answers through research.

The Research Committee would like to highlight some of the recent literature contributions of its members.

Inspired by positive experiences as an undergraduate, I signed up for the opportunity to gain research experience during residency in the Columbia University Apgar Scholars program. When Dr. Margaret Wood advised me, as a junior resident, that a career conducting clinical research path would require additional research methods training and dedicated time away from patients, I was astonished. Clinical work is exciting and energizing. The roles are clear, the gratification can be immediate, and positions are secure. In contrast, early in my clinical training, reinvesting my efforts in a parallel but separate career path felt uncertain and risky. I could not imagine, at that time, how complementary my clinical and research work would become.

Undertaking robust research may offer professional gratification and a betterment of our specialty that cannot be gleaned from clinical excellence alone. It has to be said my journey through research has been an evolved one, catalyzed by clinical questions, collaborations, mentorship and a pursuit of an ever-sharpening question around the role of oxygen and other gasotransmitters in perioperative inflammation and critical illness. To my mind, I have been very fortunate to be in an environment at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center which affords academic time, mentorship and understands the committed investment it takes to develop a home-grown clinically active researcher.

Despite surgical patients presenting to the operating room (OR) sicker than ever before, the intraoperative period has, paradoxically, become far safer. Current estimates of intraoperative mortality are less than 1 in 100,000 patients. However, 30-day postoperative mortality is still significant at 1-2%, a fact that suggests that if 30-day postop mortality were considered a disease, it would be the third leading cause of death in the United States.