Steven R. Gundry

Steven Gundry is a cum laude graduate of Yale University with special honors in Human Biological and Social Evolution. After graduating from Alpha Omega Alpha from the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine, Dr. Steven Gundry completed residencies in General Surgery and Thoracic Surgery at the University of Michigan. He served as a Clinical Associate at the National Institutes of Health for years. 

There, he invented devices that reverse the cell death seen in acute heart attacks; variations of these devices subsequently became the Gundry™ Retrograde Cardioplegia Cannula. It has become the world's most widely used device of its kind to protect the heart from damage during open-heart surgery. 

After completing a fellowship in congenital heart surgery at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, in London, Dr. Gundry was recruited as Professor and Chairman of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center. He and his partner, Leonard Bailey, pioneered infant and pediatric heart transplantation there. Together, they have performed more such transplants than any other transplant surgeon in the world. 

During his tenure at Loma Linda, Dr. Gundry pioneered the field of xenotransplantation, the study of how the genes of one species react to the transplanted heart of a foreign species. He was one of the original twenty investigators of the first FDA-approved implantable left ventricular assist device (a kind of artificial heart). 

Dr. Gundry is also the inventor of the Gundry Ministernomy, the widely used minimally invasive approach to aortic- or mitral-valve repair, the Gundry Lateral Tunnel, a "living" tissue that can rebuild parts of the heart in children with severe congenital heart malformations; and the Skoosh™ venous cannula, the most widely used cannula in minimally invasive heart operations. 

One of the fathers of robotic surgery, and a consultant to Computer Motion (now Intuitive Surgical), Dr. Steven Gundry, received early FDA approval to use robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery for coronary artery-bypass and mitral-valve operations. He holds patents on devices for connecting blood vessels, and coronary artery bypasses without sutures and repairing the mitral valve without the need for sutures or a heart-lung machine. 

He has served on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs (ASIAO) and was a founding board member and treasurer of the International Society of Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS). He recently completed two successive elected terms as President of the American Heart Association, Desert Division Board of Directors. 

Dr. Gundry has been elected a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the American College of Cardiology, the American Surgical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the College of Chest Physicians. He is a member of numerous other surgical and medical societies. As a medical researcher, Dr. Gundry has published three hundred articles, chapters, and abstracts in peer-reviewed journals on surgical, immunology, genetics, nutrition, plant-based diets, and lipid investigations.