My Beyond These Towers Story

When Keith Ruskin ’80 isn’t in the operating room or the classroom you’ll likely find him at the airfield. As Professor of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Chicago, Ruskin specializes in patients who are undergoing complex surgeries. “I work to manage chronic conditions like high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, and life-threatening conditions during a patient’s perioperative period. For a variety of reasons, any medical problem that a patient may have becomes more acute during surgery, so I often describe myself as an “internist on steroids,” says Ruskin.

Beyond his practice in health care, Ruskin also teaches two undergraduate classes: Conquest of Pain, which discusses mechanisms of anesthesia and the neurophysiology of pain, and Extreme Physiology which explores the ways humans adapt to environments like microgravity, high-altitude, deep-sea, and isolation. Pulling from his WPI experiences, Ruskin models WPI’s project-based curriculum in his classes. “I’ve incorporated the teaching style of my favorite WPI professors as part of my practice.” says Ruskin. “Instead of simply lecturing students, my classes are interactive. I’ll present a problem and then we discuss it as a group to find a solution. Not only do the students enjoy it, but I learn from them.”

And if working and teaching didn’t fill enough of Ruskin’s days, the former biotechnology major has married his clinical and academic work to his interest in aerospace human performance. “Both fields require a deep understanding of physiology and pharmacology. “I like to say that in the operating room, I use physiology to help sick people get through their surgery, and in the aerospace world, I use physiology to put healthy people into lethal environments.” Ruskin’s research concentrates on the role of alarms, alerts, and warnings in the clinical environment and in aviation. He has also published guidelines on the management of cardiac arrest during commercial airline travel and medical certification of pilots with obstructive sleep apnea.

WPI alumni often attribute a degree of their success beyond the iconic Boynton and Washburn towers to their WPI experience, and Ruskin is no different. Offering credit to the university Ruskin says, “To this day, I use the engineering approach I learned at WPI to problem solving in my clinical and academic setting; to start with a given set of facts and arrive at a workable solution to a complex problem.”

Additionally, Ruskin shares a heartwarming example of how a non-academic aspect of his WPI experience helps him in the operating room. “Patients commonly arrive in a tangle of intravenous lines, tubing for invasive monitoring, and cables. These are all attached to life safety equipment and can’t just be disconnected. I first learned how to untangle lines and coil them without disconnecting them while simultaneously watching the devices to which they’re attached as a freshman member of WPI’s Lens & Lights organization. Today, I teach those techniques to residents and medical students, who never even thought that there might be an orderly way to do this.”

In closing, Ruskin says, “WPI helped to make me into who I am today.”

Click here for a summary of Ruskin’s cooperative research with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on the role of alarms, alerts, and warnings in both the clinical environment and in aviation.