Yama Akbari is a critical care neurologist and neuroscientist, splitting his time between clinical duties as an intensive care physician in the Neuro-Critical Care Unit and running a research lab focused on consciousness, coma, and cardiac arrest/resuscitation. He also founded UCI’s Physician Innovator Training Program, the first UC-wide program teaching medical students innovation and engineering concepts in medicine to advance the field. Yama completed his BS in psychobiology from UCLA, a Medical Scientist Training Program (MD and PhD) at UC Irvine, followed by a neurology residency at UCLA and a neurocritical care fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. As a tenured Associate Professor and Division Chief of Neurocritical Care at UC Irvine, Yama’s research spans the gamut of bench research/preclinical research to clinical research on patients while applying state-of-the-art multimodal monitoring techniques on the brain, heart, and lungs to develop and apply new treatments that can help critically ill patients. The lab’s innovative bench-to-bedside perspective focuses on protecting and healing the brain during or after a variety of severe conditions including stroke, traumatic brain injury, as well as cardiac arrest and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). His goal is to improve our understanding various types of brain injury, including ischemia and reperfusion.