Karl E. Karlson, MD and Gloria A. Karlson Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Professor of Surgery

Overview

Dr Sellke is the Karl Karlson and Gloria Karlson Professor and Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Brown Medical School and the Lifespan Hospitals and Director of the Lifespan Cardiovascular Institute. Dr Sellke is a native of Indiana and graduated from Wabash College and Indiana University School of Medicine. He is a noted clinical cardiothoracic surgeon, researcher, and author. Dr Sellke was the Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Johnson and Johnson Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School prior to moving to Brown. His research interests include the regulation of the microcirculation in health and disease, ischemic injury and inflammation during cardiac surgery, collateral vascular formation and the use of growth factors and cell therapy to increase blood flow to ischemic tissue. His clinical research interests include optimizing outcomes after cardiac surgery, the reduction of bleeding and transfusion, and neurocognitive dysfunction and atrial fibrillation after surgery. Dr Sellke has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for 30 years. He served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surger for 14 years, and is currently and Associate Editor of Circulation Heart Failure, Vessel Plus and the Circulation Journal. He is on the editorial board of  Circulation, Surgery, the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, and the Journal of Cardiac Surgery. He is the Editor of the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th editions of Sabiston and Spencers' Surgery of the Chest,  a textbook on Acute Aortic Dissection and Acute Aortic Syndromes with 45 international contributors, the 1st and 2nd editions of the Atlas of Cardiac Surgical Techniques and is working on the 3rd edition. Dr. Sellke is the author of more than 620 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous book chapters and abstracts. Dr Sellke has an H-index of 96 and his work has been sited over 120,000 times.  He is the Past Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Council on Cardiovascular Surgery and Anesthesia of the American Heart Association and the Past Chairman of the Advisory Council on Cardiothoracic Surgery of the American College of Surgeons. Sellke has served on the Board of Governors of the American College of Surgeons and was Chairman of its Humanitarian and Volunteerism Awards Committee, past-Chairman of the American Heart Association Committee on Scientific Sessions Program and the Executive Committee and Program Chair of the Society of University Surgeons. He is the current Chairman of the Data Safety Monitoring Committee of the National Institutes of Health Cardiac Surgery Network and served as a full time member on the Surgery, Anesthesiology, Trauma study section, and the Bioengineering, Technology and Surgical Science study section of the NIH. He is the Past-President of the Massachusetts Society of Thoracic Surgeons, past President of the Northeast Cardiothoracic Surgical Society and is a member of numerous other organizations including the William Halsted Surgical Society, American Association for Thoracic Surgery, Society of University Surgeons, and the American Surgical Association. Dr. Sellke is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Chest Physicians, American Heart Assocation, and the American College of Surgeons. Dr Sellke is the recipient of the 2013 Indiana University School of Medicine Distinguished Alumni Award, the 2013 American Heart Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and the 2021 Brown University Distinguished Research Award. 

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas