Dr. Rachel A Maher, DDS

As the chief cardiovascular surgeon at Christiana Care, Michael K. Banbury, M.D., FACS, leads a team of highly skilled and experienced heart surgeons who perform approximately 700 open heart procedures each year. Before joining the Center for Heart & Vascular Health in April 2006, he was a distinguished clinician and researcher for nine years at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Dr. Banbury has a special interest in valve repair and replacement, coronary artery bypass, minimally invasive valve surgery and ventricular remodeling, as well as heart transplantation. He and his associates at the Cleveland Clinic over the past several years have investigated and performed surgical ventricular remodeling operations, including the Dor procedure, an innovative heart reconstruction procedure used when an aneurysm forms in the left ventricle, or pumping chamber, following a major heart attack. He has broad surgical experience in heart valve repairs and replacements and minimally invasive heart valve surgery, as well as with coronary artery bypass surgery. Dr. Banbury has been primary investigator or coinvestigator involved in numerous research projects and clinical studies. He has been an invited lecturer at numerous national and international symposia and he is the author or co-author of more than 60 scientific articles, abstracts and book chapters on topics related to his specialty interests. Dr. Banbury received a bachelor's degree at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and earned his medical degree at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington. He trained in general surgery at the New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center and completed his cardiothoracic surgery training at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1997. At the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Banbury received the 1997 Annual Research Award and the 1998 Dr. Charles H. Bryan Annual Clinical Excellence Award. He is a member of many professional and specialty related organizations and associations, including the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the American College of Surgeons and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation.