On Alumnus George Shaw (Ph.D., '90)

By: Karrie Sue Hawbaker, editor

Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with Dr. George Shaw (Ph.D., '90), who was kind enough to share with me how his career, seeded in a chilhood fascination with the space program, brought him from physics research to medical research and that, oh yeah, he's an ER doc, too.

On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, George Shaw, age five, went missing. His mother, after anxiously searching their Texas apartment and neighborhood, finally found him in the apartment above theirs. The medical students that shared that apartment, unlike the Shaw family, had a television set – something very important to George on this particular day as he sat with his eyes transfixed on the set, watching Neil Armstrong take his very first steps on the moon.

While his memory of this specific event comes mostly from the story his mother has told him, he clearly remembers the excitement of the Apollo missions of the time, especially Apollo 11, and he credits that space program with his interest in physics.

A few years later, the Shaw family moved to Fairfax Country, Virginia, where George lived until he went off to the University of Virginia – as a physics major. He earned his bachelor's degree from UVA in 1985 and then came to Maryland to pursue his Ph.D. He says the Maryland program attracted him not only because it was reasonably close to home, but also because he was unsure of exactly what area of physics he wanted to study and Maryland was definitely big enough and diverse enough in its research areas. As it turns out, he ended up focusing his research on condensed matter physics, studying with Professor Satindar (Sam) Bhagat.

Shaw raves about Bhagat, even though “writing a paper with him was torturous!” Shaw says this with a little laugh and tells me that Bhagat was not only rigorous about the research (he wanted to know what you were doing, why you were doing it, how you were thinking about and analyzing the project), but also about communicating the research and communicating it using correct grammar. Shaw says, “Any paper writing skills I have now I owe to him.”

After graduation, he took a job as a post-doctoral associate at the nearby Naval Research Lab. He had a very positive experience there, working under Dr. Geoffrey Summers (who is also the chair of the Applied Physics department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County), looking at the effects of radiation on GaAs materials.

After two years, he was feeling bored with being held up in the lab so much and, even though the work was very interesting, he felt like it didn't have much “real world” benefit. So, he took a career turn. He went to medical school, and received his M.D. from Georgetown University in 1997. He then completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Cincinnati in 2001.

Now Shaw is an emergency room doctor, an educator in a residency program, and a researcher in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati . His hospital is a level one trauma center, so he and his residents see anything and everything from people of all ages. It's fast-paced, intellectually demanding work that requires a very broad knowledge base, since he has to be able to take care of anything for at least two hours. After that, a patient might go to surgery or require the care of a specialist, but for the first two hours, Shaw is responsible for that patient. It may sound burdensome to some, but he likes it and says it definitely has its rewards. After all, even though it's not quite like the television show, Shaw tells me that “every two or three shifts I save somebody's life.”

Shaw is also now back in the lab – this time with research with a very real impact on the lives of many people. He is working to improve the treatment of acute ischemic stroke, an increasingly common problem that he often sees in the ER. These strokes account for about 80% of all strokes, and are caused by a clot in one of the major arteries of the brain. Deprived of blood and oxygen, the portion of the brain dependent on the artery is immediately injured. This can result in permanent brain damage after a short period of time. Currently, the only FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approved therapy to treat such strokes is a drug called tissue plasminogen activator, or “tPA.” This drug can break up the clot, and restore blood flow to the affected part of the brain. However, the success rates of the therapy are not wonderful and it has dangerous side effects, like bleeding in the brain that can cause additional brain damage or death.

That's why Shaw's group, an interdisciplinary team of scientists from the field of biology, medicine, biomedical engineering, biochemistry and physics, are working on a new therapy called ultrasound enhanced thrombolysis . Scientists already know that this therapy, combining ultrasound and tPA treatment of the clot yields better results. Shaw's group is trying to find out why and then how that “why” can help them even further improve the therapy. Shaw's lab is actually the first to visualize the clot at the microscopic level and watch it break up using the tPA and ultrasound combination.

Shaw says that it's amazing (and a little scary) how little we know about how the human body works, especially the brain. For instance, we still don't know why we need sleep or what is the physical basis of memory, both of which are seemingly basic questions. So, studying ischemic strokes can be a bit daunting.

While it might not seem that way at first glance, Shaw says his physics background has been invaluable. The way that physicists are trained to think is rather unique and it allows him to “parachute right into the middle of a problem.” In fact, he has a postdoc who is a physicist who he praises for his contributions in the lab.

Shaw is hesitant to recommend his career path to anyone, since it involved many years in school and requires many long and intense hours a day. However, he does say, “If you're crazy enough to do it, you can certainly make a career out of it.” He says the field of medical research is in need of more people, like physicists, who are trained in the quantitative sciences. Physicists are trained to go back to first principles to figure out a complicated problem. They bring a world viewpoint, which is very useful to this type of research. Biomedical engineering programs are more than willing to talk to physicists. And the market is good for a biomedical engineer with a physics background. Many career opportunities exist in academia and even more in industry.

Despite his warning of the many years in school and the long hours he works, Shaw appears happy – at home as well as at work. He and his great wife of nearly 20 years are now expecting their eighth child. And it is clear that he is excited and impassioned by his work.

“I don't regret doing it. It's a lot of fun,” Shaw says. “But it's kind of insane.”

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If you have questions or comments for Dr. Shaw, please contact the editor. She will be happy to pass along the message.