Innovating to Save Young Lives: Dr. Michael Ma Awarded
2024-2025 Biodesign Faculty Fellowship

Michael Ma, MD, Associate Professor and Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery in the Stanford Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery and the Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, was named one of 13 faculty members selected for the 2024–2025 Stanford Biodesign Faculty Fellowship. This program provides advanced training and mentoring to motivated Stanford University faculty members from medicine, engineering, or other schools at Stanford, with a focus on health technology innovation.

Pediatric donor hearts are in short supply, especially for infants and smaller children. Unfortunately, many children on the heart transplant waiting list die before receiving a donor heart, and many remain hospitalized while they are waiting for a transplant. To address this urgent need, Dr. Ma’s Biodesign project focuses on developing a novel pediatric organ preservation system that leverages existing perfusion technology to support its function. The goal is to increase the use of donor hearts for pediatric patients, reduce waitlist mortality, lower the cost of care through shorter hospital stays, and deliver a solution that can be deployed efficiently without requiring large, specialized teams.

Over the course of approximately eight months, the Stanford Biodesign Faculty Fellowship guides participants through a rigorous process for identifying unmet clinical needs, inventing cost-effective solutions, and preparing to implement those solutions to improve patient care. With the support of this experience, Dr. Ma will apply this structured innovation process to develop a scalable, real-world device aimed at improving access to donor hearts for children.

This work builds on Dr. Ma’s expertise in complex congenital heart surgery and his commitment to advancing innovative therapies for children with heart disease. His clinical practice encompasses all aspects of congenital heart disease, with a focus on neonates, complex biventricular repair, pulmonary artery reconstruction, and heart failure.

He serves as the Surgical Director of the Pediatric Advanced Cardiac Therapies (PACT) Program, the Complex Biventricular Reconstruction Program, and as a cardiothoracic surgeon for the Pulmonary Artery Reconstruction (PAR) Program at Stanford Children’s. He directs the Cardiovascular Engineering Research Laboratory, which applies biomechanical engineering principles to optimize existing surgical approaches and develop new surgical and endovascular therapies for treating complex heart defects. 

Dr. Ma’s project, titled “P-EVPS (Pediatric Ex Vivo Preservation System),” was selected as a finalist for the UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium’s 2025 Accelerator Pitch Competition, held on March 17, 2025, at Stanford. He also presented his work during the Biodesign Faculty Fellowship Presentation on May 30. Most recently, he received additional funding to continue this project through the Spectrum Healthtech Grants Award Program.

Previous department fellows include:

• A. Claire Watkins, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Adult Cardiac Surgery); 2022-2023 Biodesign Faculty Fellow
  
  
• Maria Currie, MD, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Adult Cardiac Surgery); 2021-2022 Biodesign Faculty Fellow
  
  
• Billie-Jean Martin, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Adult Cardiac Surgery); 2021-2022 Biodesign Faculty Fellow
  
  
• Doff McElhinney, MD, Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery (Pediatric Cardiac Surgery) and of Pediatrics (Cardiology); 2017-2018 Biodesign Faculty Fellow