FLAVIAN MARK LUPINETTI

Flavian Mark Lupinetti was born in 1953 in Steubenville, Ohio.  He grew up in Weirton and Wellsburg, small steel mill and coal mining towns in West Virginia.  He learned from observing his family and friends that brutally hard work was the natural fate of man.  He resolved to avoid that destiny for himself, and he did so in the most naïve way he could:  by becoming a doctor.  After attending West Virginia University, he went to medical school at Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1978.  It was in medical school that he developed a passion for cardiac surgery, and he dedicated himself to mastering this most challenging field. He was a resident in general surgery and in cardiothoracic surgery at Vanderbilt University.

Mark embarked on an academic career beginning at the University of Iowa.  There he began experiments with cardiac valve physiology, research funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association.  He moved on to the University of Michigan, where he continued his pursuit of both clinical and investigative surgery.  He was then recruited to become the Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Seattle Children’s Hospital.  There he instituted the first pediatric heart transplant program in Washington and developed programs for reconstructive heart surgery that were new to the Pacific Northwest.  In 2002 he moved to Phoenix to help establish the first freestanding children’s hospital in Arizona.  In 2006 he came to Medford, Oregon, to institute a new heart surgery program at Providence Medford Medical Center.  He is an author on over 100 scientific publications and is a member of all the leading cardiac surgery organizations. 

Mark now lives in southern Oregon with his dogs, the Four Weimaraners of the Apocalypse.