During the last year of medical school he spent some time at Yale University and the University of Virginia (UVa). In 2009, he came back to U.S. as a research fellow at UVa and worked with the Chairman of the department of surgery for over a year. He successfully published over a dozen of manuscripts while he was at UVa. In addition, he was the recipient of an American Heart Association (AHA) post-doctoral research fellowship award within 6 months into his fellowship. Dr. Emaminia’s research was on lung transplantation and focused on finding new ways to enhance the quality of lung tissue before they are transplanted to recipients. Using an animal model, he placed ex-planted lungs in a “lung box” which resembles the human body and kept them alive for extended period of time. This technique would result in inflation in the number of lungs that can be transplanted into patients by more than 30%.

In 2010, Dr. Emaminia was offered a fellowship position at the cardiothoracic surgery research program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda. During his time at the NIH, he worked on multiple projects aiming at development of minimally invasive cardiac surgical procedures. One of the novel procedures pursued in the NIH, was placement of the aortic valve is through a very small incision on the chest and the apex of the heart under real-time guidance of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Dr. Emaminia has published more than 20 peer reviewed articles in this very short period of time in medical and surgical journals and has presented in multiple national and international conferences. His ultimate goal is to become a physician-scientist in the field of cardiology.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21320711
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21801908
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21718868
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19199924
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17889023