J. Scott Rankin

After college and medical school in Tennessee, Dr. Rankin received his internship and first year of residency at the University of Alabama under Dr. John W. Kirklin. He then spent 2 years in military service during the Viet Nam war, and completed his general and cardiothoracic surgery residencies at Duke University under Dr. David C. Sabiston Jr. He was honored to spend the next 9 years on Dr. Sabiston’s faculty in the Department of Surgery at Duke, also running an active cardiac physiology laboratory, and starting the Duke cardiac surgery database. He then was recruited as Professor and Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of California San Francisco. In the mid-nineties, he moved back to his home in Nashville, and was on the clinical faculty at Vanderbilt University for over 20 years. During that time, he invented an aortic valve annuloplasty ring, and advanced aortic valve repair technologies. Dr. Rankin also was interested in clinical outcomes research and was a senior member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons database. Finally, he was on the part-time faculty with Dr. Vinay Badhwar at West Virginia University for 7 years. He has published over 500 scientific papers, book chapters, and surgical videos.