John J. McAuliffe III, MD, MBA
Anesthesiologist-in-Chief

Dr. McAuliffe began his career at Cincinnati Children’s in 1985 in the Department of Anesthesia. By 1994 he was named associate director. From 2002-2014 he served as research director. From 2008-2016, he added the role of director of the Division of Neurobiology. Then from 2010 to the present, he has been section chief of Intraoperative Neurophysiological Monitoring. In 2017 Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center appointed Dr. McAuliffe to the position of anesthesiologist-in-chief. A native of Phoenix, Arizona, McAuliffe received his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in 1971; his medical degree from McGill University in Montreal in 1977; and his master’s in business administration from UC’s College of Business Administration in 1997.

His interest in research and academics began in 1971 and continues to this day. During his time as an engineering student, he developed applications of the Bernoulli transformation to the solution of PDEs. He developed a model of an isovolumic beating heart that could be studied using 31P-NMR to measure the flux through the CK pathway, showing that the flux through the reaction increased at any given myocardial workload as the mitochondrial isozyme of CK increased as a percentage of total CK activity. He demonstrated that the shift in troponin T isoforms from the neonatal to mature was associated with changes in force generation and Ca+2 binding characteristics in skinned cardiac muscle fibers. He developed a model for producing biventricular hypertrophy in fetal sheep by banding the aorta and pulmonary artery of 85-day gestation fetal sheep to study shifts in expression of cardiac genes beginning with troponin T. Dr. McAuliffe has worked collaboratively with Dr. Steve Danzer to topologically based mathematical models to quantify differences between dendritic spines in the hippocampus of normal and epileptic mice. His current research is focused on developing a novel system to establish a malignant hyperthermia phenotype in patients without the need for an invasive muscle biopsy, and thereby establish a platform for the study of other pharmacogenetic muscle disorders.

James D. Gulick, MS
Senior Research Assistant

James Gulick received his MS in biochemistry and now is a senior scientist operating at a faculty level in the McAuliffe Lab. He is skilled in all facets of the laboratory's operation and is an important resource person. He oversees most of the molecular cloning and is the "go-to" person for day-to-day technical questions and help with the molecular techniques. His current position within the Department of Anesthesia, builds upon his 40 years of experience with iPSCs, tissue culture, molecular biology and muscle development. Using iPSCs derived from patients with impaired calcium handling, his goal is to create a model system that would be useful for screening future patients, avoiding potentially fatal outcomes.