Warren Zapol

Warren M. Zapol is the emeritus Anesthetist-in-Chief at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Reginald Jenney Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School. From 1994 to 2008, Zapol served as anesthetist-in-chief at MGH and is currently the director of the MGH Anesthesia Center for Critical Care Research. A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology “MIT” (1962) and the University of Rochester School of Medicine (1966), Zapol’s major research efforts include studies of acute respiratory failure in animals and humans. Supported by the National Science Foundation, he has led nine Antarctic expeditions to study the diving mechanisms and adaptations of the Weddell seal.[1] Through that research his team learned how marine mammals avoid the bends and hypoxia (low blood oxygen levels).[1] He was elected to membership in the (then) Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science in 2002. In 2003, he was awarded the Intellectual Property Owners Association’s Inventor of the Year Award for the treatment of hypoxic human newborns with inhaled nitric oxide, a technique now used to save the lives of thousands of babies each year that he pioneered with his MGH team. In 2006, a steep mountain glacier in Antarctica was named for Dr. Zapol (78° 35’S, 85° 51’W). In 2008, he was appointed by President George W. Bush and in 2012 reappointed by President Barack Obama as an academic representative to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. In 2010 he presented the John W. Severinghaus Lecture on Translational Research at the American Society of Anesthesiologists Annual Meeting. In 2012, he was designated as a Distinguished Scientist by the American Heart Association In 2014, Zapol together with his son David Zapol founded Third Pole Therapeutics, a US-based company developing next generation life-saving heart and lung therapies. The company is developing products that will generate and deliver electric nitric oxide. Zapol was inducted as a Fellow by the National Academy of Inventors in 2016.