Hi, I'm Chris Waters in the College of Medicine.
As I was growing up, I can remember, I always wanted to know how things worked.
I wanted to figure things out.
As an undergraduate, I was studying Chemical Engineering.
And, one of the chemistry professors that I had invited me to do research with him in
his lab during the summer.
And then, when I went to graduate school, I decided I wanted to focus more on biomedical
research.
And so I majored in Biomedical Engineering, and that's where it sort of really took off
to the kind of work I do now.
In my lab, we focus on a disease called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome or ARDS.
ARDS can be caused by many different things.
So, severe infections like pneumonia, influenza, other types of infection.
Smoke inhalation.
Things like this can lead to this more severe form of acute lung injury.
And so, our lab focuses on aspects of the oxygen and the mechanical ventilation, which,
although necessary and life-saving, can lead to additional injury if not done properly.
Mechanically ventilating a patient with what are called lung protective ventilation strategies
are absolutely essential.
Mortality for ARDS is very high.
Somewhere around 40 percent of the patients die.
But simply making a simple change in how the ventilator is set, by lowering tidal volumes,
made a huge impact on mortality in these patients.
So, tidal volume is in a single breath, how much goes in and how much goes out.
So we want to minimize how much volume is going in each breath.
We do know something about how that affects survival, but we don't know the mechanisms.
We don't know exactly how just simply lowing tidal volumes led to this improvement
in outcomes for the patients.
We focus on the mechanical forces and mechanical stretching that occurs in the lungs, as well
as how high levels of oxygen, which we're normally not exposed to,
can affect these processes.
Because of my engineering background, I started thinking about what was happening in the lungs
you know, if you think about a wound on your skin that has to heal, that healing process
occurs on a substrate that's not moving.
But if you think about what's happening in the lungs when they're repairing, it's on
a substrate that's constantly stretching
So we can isolate cells from the mice, or from rats, grow them in culture, and in order
to study this process, we have a chamber where we can expose the cells
to high concentrations of oxygen.
And we also have a device that allows us to grow the cells on an elastic membrane.
And then a vacuum pulls the membrane down, and then releases it; pulls it down, releases it.
To simulate what's happening in a lung during a breathing cycle.
And so, we can grow cells on that membrane and we can stimulate those cells with some
infectious agent, and then we can monitor the repair mechanisms
or the inflammation mechanisms.
Anytime that I have mentored students or junior faculty and as I watch them sort of develop
and learn how to do research that they didn't know how to do before and then have success.
Those are certainly some of the most satisfying moments for me.
I very much enjoy interacting with the people in the lab, going over data, designing experiments,
discussing the results.
That's what I enjoy the most.
Also interacting with colleagues around the world, literally.
My wife, who also just joined - we came here together in December.
She was interested in a position here, and so, I started looking as well, and since we've
gotten here, it's just been wonderful.
We've been welcomed and supported.
You know, you've got everything on one campus.
It's not just the College of Medicine, it's all the other professional schools, all the
undergraduate schools, and you've got students everywhere, and that just - it makes the environment
more vibrant.
And I enjoy that.
I really - I love being around students and it's a great environment here.
UK is really on the upswing in terms of research.
There are just so many things going on.
Buildings are being built.
There's a lot of activity.
Not just biomedical research.
I'm actually collaborating with someone in Mechanical Engineering.
There are people in Chemistry that I've been interacting with.
And you can really interact with people because everybody's close by - everything's in close proximity.