Roderic G. Eckenhoff

It is a pleasure to welcome back Professor Roderic G. Eckenhoff, Austin Lamont Professor of Anesthesia at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA, USA). After graduating from Northwestern University Medical School (1978), he joined the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton, CT. After completing his anesthesia residency at Penn, he pursued basic science training in the Andrew Somlyo lab (and at Penn as well). He accidentally discovered an approach to measure subcellular concentrations of anesthetics, ultimately discovering anesthetic photolabeling, and adapting a series of traditionally biophysical approaches to study anesthetic mechanisms. He is the senior author of the Recommendations for the nomenclature of cognitive change associated with anesthesia and surgery-2018, published jointly in the major anesthesia journals. How do we define the cognitive changes we observe in our patients postoperatively, and can we do something about it? “On how to treat the brain well in the perioperative phase – or can we? What is PND (perioperative neurocognitive disorder) and how is it different from POCD?”