Odmara Barreto Chang, MD, PhD, Appointed as a John Severinghaus Assistant Professor for 2022-2024

We are pleased to announce that the department has named Odmara Barreto Chang, MD, PhD, as a Severinghaus assistant professor for academic years 2022-2024. Named for the late John Severinghaus, MD, this title honors an assistant professor in the department whose research shows exciting promise and relevance to problems in human medicine.  

Barreto Chang joined the faculty in 2018 after completing anesthesia residency training and a neuroanesthesia research fellowship on the department’s T32 training grant. In 2020, she received a Weill Pilot Award for Junior Investigators in the Neurosciences for her study, “Perioperative Anesthesia Neurocognitive Disorder Assessment-Geriatric (PANDA-G),” as well as a diversity supplement from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). She has published her work on understanding the molecular and behavioral basis of cognitive impairment after surgery in leading anesthesiology journals. She was the recipient of the UCSF School of Medicine Irene Perstein Award for 2021 and is an active member of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) Committee on Professional Diversity, for which she is the incoming Vice Chair of 2022-2023. She also directs the ASA Doctors Back to School Program and recently was awarded an ASA mentoring grant with her mentee, UCSF medical student Niti Pawar, for their project, “Evaluating Loan Burden in Minorities in Anesthesiology and its Impact on Well-Being, Board Scores, and Career Planning.” The image at the top of this page is from figure 1 of their January 2022 Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience article, "Burst Suppression During General Anesthesia and Postoperative Outcomes: Mini Review." Barreto Chang’s primary research mentor is Dr. Katherine Possin, and her co-mentor is Judith Hellman, MD. 

John Severinghaus, Pioneer of Anesthesia and Medicine

As one of our first recruits and longest-standing faculty members, John W. Severinghaus, MD, had an enormous impact on the UCSF Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care. Originally a physicist, the man his friend Ted Eger called a “master tinkerer” was behind some of the most significant advances in anesthesiology and medicine, including the invention of the first 3-function blood gas analysis machine, a system for mass spectrometry in the OR, and critical discoveries about the mysteries of acclimatization. His lab, pictured below in 1964, was a virtual petri dish for leading researchers and important research, where Robert Mitchell and Hans Loeschke made their discovery of the medullary area that regulates blood PCO2, keeping spinal fluid pH constant, and where, at Severinghaus’ behest, Ted Eger developed the concept for minimum alveolar concentration, or “MAC.”