Postdoctoral Affairs

Postdoc Profile

Bryan Caldwell, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Pharmacology, has embraced the research opportunities—and the urban lifestyle—of Upstate Medical University.

Caldwell and his family live in a fourth-floor walkup in Syracuse's resurgent Armory Square district, and they love it. They don't own a car, relying instead on buses and their feet. Occasionally, they rent a car on the weekends and go to area parks and beaches.

For Bryan Caldwell, it's either a short bus ride or a 20-minute walk to the Upstate campus and the lab of Arkady Pertsov, professor of pharmacology. Pertsov's lab is the only one in the world using three-dimensional optical mapping to monitor electrical waves inside the heart and their role in cardiac arrhythmias.

"Upstate was the place for me to come to conduct the research in electrophysiology that I am interested in," Caldwell said.

Caldwell, who met Pertsov at a conference in San Francisco in 2008, is researching the effects of electric fields on cardiac tissue and the underlying mechanisms that allow defibrillation to occur. "We hope to develop important new information to aid in the development of low-amplitude defibrillation protocols for implantable devices," Caldwell said.

The Caldwells are natives of New Zealand, where Bryan continued a career as lighting designer for professional theatrical productions while earning his PhD from the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, at the University of Auckland.