Malakh L. Shrestha, M.B.B.S., Ph.D.

Hello. My name is Malakh Shrestha, a cardiac surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. And I have the privilege of being the Director of the Aortic Surgery. Before coming to Mayo Clinic, I worked at the Hanover Medical University Hospital in Germany for 26 years. At Hanover, I was the Director of Aortic Surgery, as well as the Vice Chairman in the Division of Cardiothoracic Transplantation and Vascular Surgery. Hanover Medical University Hospital, where surgical innovations like the elephant trunk technique and the frozen elephant trunk technique where developed, has been one of the leading hospitals in the world for treating aortic diseases. I myself was born in Nepal, an ancient country with 3,000 years of history. Also famous for Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, and being the birthplace of Budha, the founder of Buddhism. I went to the medical school in Calcutta University in India and did my cardiac surgery residency training in Hanover, Germany. I however, see myself as a global academic cardiac surgeon. Having either taught or operated in almost 50 countries of the world. I decided to join the Mayo Clinic because, frankly speaking, I've never seen a better on hospital anywhere in the world. Here at the Mayo Clinic, the only goal for more than 100 years has been that the needs of the patients come first. We tried to do everything possible to achieve that goal. This is probably the reason that Mayo has been consistently ranked as the best hospital in the world. My surgical expertise has been in the field of aortic valve repair and complex aortic arch surgery, especially the total aortic arch replacements with the elephant trunk technique. I perform most of these procedures, especially aortic root replacements, both valve sparing and replacement via minimally invasive access. These are properly, technically speaking, the most difficult operations that one can perform on a human body. However, with modern techniques, we have been able to treat patients with complex aortic disease with very low operative leaks. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, I have been trusted by thousands of patients so that I was able to acquire probably one of the largest experiences in the Western world in these complex operations. It has been the greatest honor of my life to be able to help these sick patients, to be able to give our patients the best possible treatment. We are in the process of establishing the largest aortic center in the world where doctors have different faculties, like the cardiologist, the radiologist, cardiac and vascular surgeons, along with nurses and other paramedical specialists, will work even more closely and intensively. This will help us to keep on fulfilling our goal also in future that the needs of our patients come fast as it has been for more than 100 years.