Have you met Jayan, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and a 2019 Alumni Award recipient? Spend the next few minutes getting to know him a little better.
Where is your favourite place on campus?
Right here in The Mazankowski Operating Room. I've been in this building since I started with the Faculty of Medicine in July of 2011.
Tablet or paper?
Tablet. I'm trying to be more environmentally conscious.
Name one thing you've brought to work from home.
My iPod. I play music in the operating room - it's almost religious. I play a lot of oldies music from the 70's and 80's, and maybe some contemporary things on Fridays.
What is the one thing you can't live without?
Coffee. It's a starter almost every morning. I have a cup at home, but I usually need to refuel midday at the Trendz in the hospital.
If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
A safari in Africa. It's something I've always wanted to do but never done. I'd probably start somewhere like Tanzania.
You can invite anyone - alive or dead, real or fictional - to dinner. Who would it be?
Steve Jobs. I'd like to understand his perspective on how he was able to be unique and maintain an extreme level of motivation and productivity while being a supreme innovator.
Or maybe someone like Albert Einstein, although I'm not nearly smart enough to have an intelligent conversation with him. I'd like to get a better understanding of how he came up with the theory of relativity, a theory which even people like myself can understand he developed from concepts that were so abstract at the time.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
Somebody working in Artificial Machine Learning. It's an area I don't understand well and I think it'll be a big part of the future. It's something I'd like to learn more about.
What does "uplifting the whole people" mean to you?
It reflects the mandate to not only come to the U of A to seek a higher education, but that the output benefits society on a national and global level. The outputs are various - from things like the Faculty of Engineering improving how we use energy, to things we're trying to do in our own lab where we're trying to make organs better for transplantation to increase their availability to improve outcomes in organ transplants.
If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
Conflict - in the sense of our inability to identify common ground among people where conflict occurs internationally over what seems to be insignificant things.
Dr. Jayan Nagendran is from Edmonton, Alberta. He attended undergraduate and medical school at the University of Alberta and joined the residency program in Cardiac Surgery at the University of Alberta in 2001. During his residency Dr. Jayan Nagendran completed a PhD in Experimental Medicine, examining the transcriptional and metabolic shifts that occur during right ventricular hypertrophy, with the potential of ventricular-specific therapeutic targeting of the hypertrophied right ventricle in disease. In 2009, he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada.Dr. Jayan Nagendran sub-specialized in cardiothoracic transplantation surgery at Stanford University from 2009 to 2011. As a clinical Cardiothoracic Transplant Surgeon at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, Dr. Jayan Nagendran has a direct impact on vulnerable patients with end-stage chronic lung disease. As a young investigator and being an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery, he has shifted his focus to ex-vivo thoracic organ perfusion in transplantation. Dr. Jayan Nagendran is keenly interested in transplantation, and improvement of donor organ function. In July 2011, Dr. Jayan Nagendran became the Director of Research for the Division of Cardiac Surgery.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.