Akif Ündar, Ph.D.
Professor of Pediatrics, Surgery, and Bioengineering

After completing his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and his first master's degree in Computer Science, Dr. Ündar decided to pursue a career in Biomedical Engineering because it combines engineering with medicine.  His aspiration for biomedical engineering was and still is to help underserved populations.  Therefore, he intentionally stayed in academia in an effort to improve the lives of underserved individuals regardless of the commercial profit.

His passion is the development of novel technologies and methodologies to be used in minimizing the adverse effects of cardiovascular operations, mechanical circulatory support systems and cardiopulmonary bypass procedures in neonates, infants, and children. In particular, Dr. Ündar focuses on research in minimizing cerebral,myocardial, pulmonary, and renal injury during and after pediatric cardiopulmonary bypass procedures (open-heart surgeries)and mechanical circulatory support.  His research specialties include pediatric heart-lung machines,pulsatile versus non-pulsatile perfusion, pediatric mechanical circulatory support systems, complement, neutrophil, platelet, and cytokine inhibition during pediatric open-heart procedures, microdevices for measuring systemic inflammation in real-time, detection and classification of microemboli, blood viscoelasticity, and plasma proteomics.

He is the Founder & Director of the Penn State Hershey Pediatric Cardiovascular Research Center. He is also the Founder & President of an International Society for Pediatric Mechanical Cardiopulmonary Support (Non-profit tax exempt [503 (c) (3)] scientific organization).  Dr. Ündar  has also established an International Conference on Pediatric Mechanical Circulatory Support Systems and Pediatric Cardiopulmonary Perfusion. 

The first annual meeting was held at the Hotel Hershey, Hershey, Pennsylvania in May of 2005. Since then, Dr. Ündar and colleagues have had seven international conferences with over 1,800 participants from 31 countries in attendance at these events. Based on full manuscripts, 60 Young Investigator Awards were awarded during the past seven years. As a result of these events, over 350 manuscripts have been generated for this underserved research area. These publications have become the largest resource for the investigators of pediatric mechanical cardiovascular research.

These three major entities, International Conference, Research Center, and International Society have an identical mission and three major objectives. The mission is to focus on the current problems associated with pediatric cardiac patients during and after acute or chronic cardiac support. The International Conference, Research Center, and International Society will bring together as many distinguished clinicians, bioengineers, and basic scientists as possible to precisely define current problems and suggest novel approaches and solutions.

Dr. Ündar have authored and co-authored over 525 publications (over 214 articles, 9 conference proceedings and over 300 abstracts), including several invited editorials (as of March 2012).  To date, Dr. Ündar have presented over 335 scientific papers including several invited lectures and visiting professorships at national and international conferences. He has also organized several scientific panels for national and international conferences.

As a part of the ATAA's  Community Information Service (CIS), the ATAA Executive Committee has decided to run the ATAA StarTURK program to recognize and commend successful Turkish Americans in the sciences, medicine, arts, business, literature, politics, sports and general vocations.  We invite the Turkish American community to participate in this program by writing to assembly@ataa.org regarding successful Turkish Americans in your communities.