In March 1997 Davis Drinkwater, M.D., joined the Vanderbilt faculty as the William S. Stoney Professor of Surgery and Chairman of the Department of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery. Dr. Drinkwater, is a 1969 graduate of Harvard University and a 1976 graduate of the University of Vermont Medical School. In between, he earned a graduate degree in physiology from Harvard.
He served both his surgical and cardiothoracic and vascular surgery residencies at McGill University in Montreal and a subsequent fellowship in thoracic surgery at The Hospital for Sick Children in London in 1983. He was a cardiothoracic fellow at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston in 1984.
Dr. Drinkwater came to Vanderbilt after 12 years at UCLA where he was professor of Surgery at the UCLA School of Medicine and director of the UCLA Cardiac Transplantation Program. He was also chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Wadsworth's Veterans Administration Hospital, and associate medical director of the UCLA Perfusion and Assist Device Service. He brought to the Department his very broad and extensive clinical experience in both congenital and adult heart surgery and transplantation. One of his primary areas of clinical interest was the surgical treatment of end-stage cardiac failure.