We are pleased to welcome our newest executive board members Drs. Joseph Cravero, Cynthia Lien, and Danny Muehlschlegel to their three-year term and Dr. G. Burkhard Mackensen to a two-year term starting January 2025. The Executive Board is comprised of department chairs of active contributing MPOG sites and are elected by a vote of the MPOG department chairs.  They provide guidance to MPOG in areas of strategic and operational importance.

Joseph Cravero, MD, FAAP is the Anesthesiologist-in-Chief at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. He is the Milton H. Alper Chair in Pediatric Anesthesia Outcomes Research, founder of the Society for Pediatric Sedation and the Pediatric Sedation Research Consortium. He has served as a section editor for the Journal Pediatric Anesthesia for over 15 years and is on the editorial board of Anesthesia and Analgesia. He and a Senior Examiner for the American Board of Anesthesiology. Dr. Cravero received his Doctor of Medicine degree from University of Virginia. He completed residency in pediatrics at the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver, Colorado and residency in Anesthesiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. His research has been focused on outcomes analysis in both pediatrics and anesthesia. His work has yielded data comparing various models of providing pediatric anesthesia/sedation. He has explored the impact of these techniques with respect to parental satisfaction, patient personality, postoperative agitation and other outcomes. He has created the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia Improvement Network—a national data-sharing group that evaluates analgesia techniques and outcomes after major surgical interventions in children and adolescents.

Cynthia Lien, MD is the John P. Kampine Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) in Milwaukee. Dr. Lien earned her undergraduate degree from Brown University, her MD from Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons, where she also completed her residency in Anesthesiology. After completing residency, she joined the faculty at NewYork Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and was a Cornell faculty member for 28 years. At Cornell she was the Vice Chair for Academic Affairs and developed her career in studying the pharmacology of nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocking agents.

G. Burkhard Mackensen, MD, PhD, FASE is the Allan J. Treuer Endowed Professor of Anesthesiology and Chair of the University of Washington Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine in Seattle, WA. He also serves as the Director of Interventional Echocardiography at the UW Medicine Heart Institute. Dr. Mackensen is a practicing cardiothoracic anesthesiologist and a key member of the UW structural heart valve team. As an internationally recognized expert in perioperative and interventional echocardiography, Dr. Mackensen is intimately involved in multidisciplinary efforts that aim to advance minimally invasive transcatheter cardiovascular care. He has given numerous national and international lectures on the role of 2D and 3D TEE in interventional/structural heart disease and surgical decision making,and has published over 140 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the author of more than 20 book chapters.

J. Danny Muehlschlegel, MD, MMSc, MBA, FAHA, FASA is an attending cardiovascular anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he serves as the Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine. He is also a Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Mark C. Rogers Professor. As a cardiac anesthesiologist with significant subspecialty training in all aspects of cardiac disease and transesophageal echocardiography, Dr. Muehlschlegel is a perioperative physician guiding the care of very sick patients with cardiovascular disease. 

They will be joining our existing elected Executive Board members: Drs. Brian Bateman, Dan Berkowitz, Hugh Hemmings, Peggy McNaull, Kelly McQueen, and Jill Mhyre (see the Executive Board page for a full list of members).

We thank our outgoing board members: Drs. Maxime Cannesson, Deborah Culley, and Warren Sandberg.  We are grateful for their time, support, and guidance to MPOG over the last three years.