Dr. Michael Bates has been Editorial Review Group Chair in Cardiac Surgery and Thoracic surgery for Doody’s Review Service since 2012. Since then, we have sent him 77 books, and he has organized reviews of 59 of them, calling on 19 reviewers, but reviewing many himself.

Dr. Bates graduated from Eastern Virginia Medical School and joined the Department of Surgery at Ochsner as an intern in 2000. He completed residencies in surgery and thoracic surgery at Ochsner and a fellowship at Stanford before returning as a staff cardiac surgeon in 2008. He is the Director of the Thoracic Transplant Program and the Program Director for Ochsner’s Thoracic Residency.

Dr. Bates pursues a variety of clinical interests, which includes all aspects of adult cardiac surgery such as aortic surgery and valve sparing aortic root replacement, mitral valve repair, and coronary bypass surgery with a focus on the use of bilateral mammary arteries. He performs heart and lung transplants as well as mechanical circulatory support. Other areas of his practice are transcatheter valves, thoracic outlet syndrome, atrial fibrillation, and surgery for CTEPH. However, his favorite work is in education, and he maintains a special interest in teaching cardiac surgery to residents.

After Hurricane Katrina, the thoracic training program was voluntarily closed and much of Dr. Bates’s recent work has been devoted to reopening the program. He takes great pride in making this training available again at Ochsner and for our state. As a clinical surgeon, his primary goal is to continue improvement on excellent outcomes and the safety and experience of his patients at Ochsner.