DUCCS Vice President. Ricky Schneider – Feb, 2015

The DUCCS Board and Membership extend our deepest sympathy to Dr. Robert and Mrs. Susan Davidson on the senseless and untimely death of their son, Dr. Michael Jon Davidson, in Boston on January 20, 2015. Michael, a 44-year-old cardiac surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is survived by his wife, plastic surgeon Dr. Terri Halperin, and their children, Kate, Liv and Graham.

Michael trained in cardiovascular surgery at the Brigham and in general surgery at Duke, after attending Yale Medical School and Princeton University. He was known at the Brigham for “saving lives and improving the quality of life for every patient he cared for.” Some of us had the pleasure of meeting this remarkable young man at a DUCCS dinner at the time of the LEXUS trial in 1995. Donations in Michael’s memory can be made to The Michael J. Davidson Family Fund c/o RTN Federal Credit Union, 600 Main Street, Waltham MA 02452.

Michael’s father, Bob, an interventional and general cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is a Duke cardiology fellowship graduate, a founding member of DUCCS, and a longtime friend to many of us. He is lead author of the first article about the DUCCS consortium to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal: Davidson RM, McNeer JF, Logan L, Higginbotham MB, Anderson J, Blackshear J, Chu A, Hettleman B, McGrew F, Meese R, O’Connor C, Schneider RM, Wagner GS, EXERDUCCS Investigators: A cooperative network of trained sites for the conduct of a complex clinical trial: a new concept in multicenter clinical research. Am Heart J 151:451-456, 2006