2026 William W. L. Glenn Lecturer – Joyce Ann Wahr, MD, FAHA

Joyce Ann Wahr, MD, FAHA

University of Minnesota Medical School
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Joyce A. Wahr, MD, is a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Minnesota. Her primary focus is improving outcomes of surgical patients.

Wahr completed medical school at the University of Colorado, followed by two years of surgery internship at the University of Michigan. She completed an anesthesiology residency at University of California, San Francisco.

After two years of private practice in California, she returned to Michigan and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1984. Wahr was one of the first at the university to specialize in cardiac anesthesiology and, with her like-minded colleagues, to develop a specialized cardiac anesthesia team. She served as the first director of cardiac anesthesiology, moving on to direct a busy cardiac research team from 1990 to 2003. During those years, the University of Michigan Division of Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology was a founding member of the Multicenter Study of Perioperative Ischemia (McSPI), a consortium of 25 academic cardiac anesthesiology teams that enrolled over 7,000 cardiac surgery patients in a detailed outcome database.

Wahr served as chair of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists Foundation, an organization responsible for the FOCUS Patient Safety initiative, bringing together operative nursing, perfusionists, surgeons and anesthesiologists to tackle the issues of human error in the cardiac OR. As part of this initiative, she and Nancy Nussmeier led a team to write “Patient Safety in the Cardiac Operating Room: Human Factors and Teamwork: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association” (2013).