Dr. Harvey Borovetz is a professor and chair in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, a professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, and the Robert L. Hardesty Professor in the Department of Surgery. Within the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Borovetz holds the position of Deputy Director of Artificial Organs and Medical Devices.
After receiving his BA in Physics from Brandeis University in 1969, Dr. Borovetz went on to earn an MS and a PhD degree, both in bioengineering, from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973 and 1976, respectively. Dr. Borovetz's current research interests are focused on the design and clinical utilization of cardiovascular organ replacements for both adult and pediatric patients.
Since 1986, he has headed the University's Clinical Bioengineering Program in Mechanical Circulatory Support. This program supports patients who are implanted with a left ventricular assist device, or a total artificial heart, as a bridge to cardiac transplantation. This work in mechanical circulatory support follows Dr. Borovetz's early efforts in which he helped cardiac surgeons apply extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to treat successfully a large series of neonates in respiratory distress.
Another area of research in which Dr. Borovetz and his team are involved include investigating the role of hemodynamics in vascular biology and physiology. For this work, Dr. Borovetz and his colleagues developed a pulsatile perfusion apparatus for the purpose of exposing intact animal and human vessels to realistic physiologic and pathophysiologic hemodynamics (e.g., hypertension) ex-vivo. As such, this work complements the parallel plate flow and cell culture studies, which investigate the role of shear stress in endothelial cell biology. A seminal study in this area was the investigation of the putative biologic effects of exposing saphenous vein bypass grafts to arterial hemodynamics and biomechanical forces. The resulting paper, which evolved from nearly 10 years of effort in biomechanics and biochemical measurements of intact blood vessels, was awarded the prestigious Liebig Award for Vascular Surgery Research at the 1990 annual meeting of the International Society for Cardiovascular Surgery.
Dr. Borovetz is a fellow the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, a past member of the Board of Trustees of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs, and a past member of the Board of Directors of The Biomedical Engineering Society. He has served on numerous NIH study sections, as both an ad hoc reviewer on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Whitaker Foundation and an external reviewer for the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers University and the Bioengineering/Biotechnology initiative at the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Borovetz has also served as a panelist for the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding its National Technology Initiative. In 1999 and 2000, Dr. Borovetz spent one-half time at the NIH, where he served as a Health Sciences Administrator for the Bioengineering Research Group of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
View Publications.CONTACT INFORMATION
Harvey S. Borovetz, Ph.D.Phone: (412) 624-4725
Email: borovetzhs@upmc.edu