Tim Chuter Lauded For Invention of Life-Saving Stent to Repair Aortic Aneurysms

The pioneering work of Timothy Chuter, M.D., a Professor of Vascular Surgery at UCSF, was recently profiled in the San Francisco Chronicle. The story cited his major accomplishments and important discoveries in the field: 

The aortic aneurysms and areas he’s worked on are preventing people from dying from ruptured aneurysms,” said Dr. Peter Lawrence, president of the Society of Vascular Surgery, which honored Chuter in 2008. “It’s not that often that somebody comes along and solves a problem or begins the process of solving a problem that has a huge, dramatic impact on health care.”

Chuter, 56, is modest about his accomplishments. “I was lucky and first,” he said. “Those are helpful things.”

After studying medicine in the 1980s in his native England, Chuter left for New York to marry an actress and be a resident at Columbia University. By 1990, when he arrived at University of Rochester for a fellowship, his wife had died and he’d remarried a Columbia classmate, with whom he was raising three young children.

Despite his limited resources, he wanted to invent things. He’d never formally studied engineering, but his father was an engineer, and physics fascinated him. “It’s shocking how little math and physics you need to know to do basic device design,” he said. “Just a little bit of basic geometry is all it requires.