Timothy P. Canavan, M.D.

New OB-GYN chairman at Upstate Medical University has extensive expertise in the field of maternal health. He is the author of more than 30 published papers in peer-reviewed journals and authored numerous books, chapters and abstracts. He talks about his new position

By Chris Motola

 

Q: You recently became the new head of obstetrics and gynecology at Upstate Medical University. How long have you been at it?

A: Since Oct. 28, 2024.

Q: How have your first two months gone?

A: Very interesting. I spent most of the month learning the culture of the organization, the people who work here, what makes them tick, what are they like, who are they. And also a lot about the geography of the location, because all of that was new to me. Obviously I knew where Syracuse was, but I hadn’t actually lived in Central New York before. So I spent my first month getting to know who everyone was and understanding the culture.

Q: And you’re coming from Pittsburgh, correct?

A: Yes, I was previously working for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I worked in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg; the University of Pittsburgh owns hospitals in both locations and I helped them with hospitals at both locations.

Q: Syracuse is bit smaller than Pittsburgh, but it has some similar characteristics. Has that made the transition easier? Harder?

A: To tell you the truth Pittsburgh and Syracuse are very similar. Pittsburgh definitely has a slightly larger downtown area. There are more skyscrapers, giving it a skyline bit closer to New York City’s. Syracuse has a few buildings but then quickly becomes more of a manufacturing town. Pittsburgh has some of that as well with its history of steel and coal. So Syracuse reminds me a lot of Pittsburgh in some ways. But if you drive 15 minutes in any direction here you’re seeing farms. With Pittsburgh you probably have to drive an hour, hour-and-a-half to see a similar landscape.

Q: What ultimately brought you up here?

A: I was working in a much different position than I am now, but I’d previously worked for a state university down in Tennessee — East Tennessee State University — which has a similar dynamic to Syracuse. They have a medical school, although they don’t have a hospital, but they collaborate with a nonprofit hospital system in a way that’s similar to how SUNY Upstate operates. So it was an opportunity to do some of the things I was doing down in Tennessee but on a different level. Syracuse has a much bigger and more complicated state medical system. SUNY is a more complicated system. There’s more opportunity for growth, moving services out to patients in areas where there is poor healthcare availability, which I’ve done in both Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

Q: You’ve been involved in a lot of research. What have you been working on?

A: My present research is really on the pelvic floor and how it may impact preterm birth. I had an ongoing study at the University of Pittsburgh that I’ll probably restart here. Also looking at how various parameters affect how normal and abnormal babies grow. So we’re always interested in how babies are growing and whether their growth suggests that the pregnancy is healthy or the pregnancy is at risk. And trying to figure that out is not that easy, because we all grow a little differently. Some of us are short and chubby and some of us are tall and skinny, so there are some differences between what can be considered normal growth. There also seems to be some link between how the placenta develops and how that influences heart development. So some of our research has looked at how to improve placental function and how it might influence the risks of the baby developing a heart problem. If the blood isn’t flowing through the placenta correctly it may not be flowing through the heart correctly. Blood flow through the very early heart affects its development, so if the blood flow is altered, the development is altered. So that’s where some of the research is based.

Q: How did you hone in on that concept as a subject of study? Was it based on what you encountered in practice?

A: I was always interested in the pelvic floor. In gynecology we see that when the pelvic floor gets weak women develop prolapse and all this other stuff, especially during menopause. But I always wondered if the pelvic floor was weak, how would it affect a woman’s ability to hold her pregnancy because those muscles of the pelvic floor support the pregnancy uterus. So if the pelvic floor is weak it may result in the uterus being weakened which may increase the risk of preterm birth. So that’s been a long interest based on my experience with patients with pelvic floor injuries. That carried through when I started doing more high-risk obstetrics. What interested me in high-risk obstetrics was just trying to figure out a mathematical way to monitor abnormal fetal growth. As we followed fetal growth we started to look more at the placenta. The placenta is kind of the black box of the pregnancy. It tells us a little bit about what’s providing nutrition to the baby and what we’ve learned is that moms who have unusual-looking placentas on ultrasound, that are small and dysfunctional, those babies tend to have more heart disease. And that prompted us to look at the fetal heart and placental development. UPMC had a study going on on it from a biochemical perspective, so we wanted to do one more from a clinical perspective.

Q: Does it look like there’s a possibility of developing interventions in these cases?

A: Yeah, when it comes to the pelvic floor there are opportunities to improve its condition through exercise and physical therapy both before and during pregnancy. When it comes to fetal growth, having better methods for determining whether it’s normal or abnormal would help us either deliver them early or intervene in a way that decreases the chance of stillbirth. So being able to recognize poor growth may help us there. For the placental impact on cardiac disease, we don’t really have good tools for intervening but we may be able to focus more on newborns and make sure we’re delivering them in places where heart disease can be better treated. That’s important in places that are rural because we know transporting babies with heart problems over long distances increases their risk of disease and poor outcomes. So being able to predict those things can help us make sure patients are delivering in the right place strategically.

 

Lifelines

Name: Timothy P. Canavan, M.D.

Position: Chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Upstate Medical University

Hometown: Brooklyn

Education: Earned undergraduate degree from St. John’s University in Queens, where he graduated magna cum laude and earned the Gold Key in chemistry; earned his medical degree at the SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn in 1988 and his MSc (Master of Science in medical sciences) at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005; in 1991 earned the Galloway Oncology Fellow Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center New York

Affiliations: SUNY Upstate Medical University

Organizations: American Medical Association, American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine

Family: Married, three adult daughters

Hobbies: Fixing cars, photography, outdoor activities