Alumni Magazine 2001-2002 UNIVERSITYOFMICHIGAN - Rackham ...

Photo by Sheila Ryan
One of Milton Morris’ most
memorable moments as a
member of Northwestern
University’s football team came
against the University of Michigan, a
33-yard pass reception when he was a
freshman in 1988. In 1992, Michigan
caught Morris — he earned his master’s
and PhD in electrical engineering
from U-M — and then Guidant
Corporation of St. Paul, Minnesota,
did the same. Fewer than four years
after joining that company, one of the
world’s leading makers of cardiac
devices, Morris became its manager
of tachycardia therapy research, in
charge of designing and testing products
that will add many moments to
many lives.
Where he’s at right now offers him
the best of several worlds. He still
does research, publishes articles and
presents at professional conferences,
although his research is usually, and
understandably, targeted toward specific
applications. He also returns to
Ann Arbor periodically, both to recruit
doctoral students for Guidant and as a
member of the Rackham Dean’s
Advisory Board, and he teaches courses
at the University of Minnesota.
Algorithms
for Better Living
“It’s not necessarily about saving
lives but certainly improving
the quality of life.”
Multiple worlds are nothing new to
Morris, although he says excelling
both academically and athletically is
not as rare as the conventional wisdom
would have it. This is based not
only on his own playing career, but
also on the three years he spent tutoring
athletes while he was in graduate
school, the last two focused on football
players.
“The college athlete probably gets a
bum rap,” he says. “There are a lot of
really bright guys on the football team
and I’m not sure people are aware of
that or care to acknowledge it. I am
still familiar with the pain and struggle
associated with undergraduate
football and engineering.”
The loop he’s in now has been dominated
by spearheading improvements
to the implantable cardioverter defibrillator
(ICD), the most recent addition
to Vice President Cheney’s internal
hardware. “Guidant is a major
manufacturer of that device, although
his comes from the competition,” says
Morris, “but he does have one of our
stents!”
The ICD addresses irregularities in
the heartbeat that can render victims
fatigued and dizzy. “It’s not necessarily
about saving lives but certainly
improving the quality of life,” he says.
“A major thrust of what I’ve been
doing here for the last three years or
so is designing the algorithms that
allow the device to detect an atrial
arrhythmia from a ventricular arrhythmia
and also to evaluate the actual
therapies and the diagnostics that this
device would provide. I actually came
up with some of the algorithms, tested
those algorithms and transferred them
over to the design teams, set up some
clinical studies in Europe and Asia to
look at therapies for atrial fibrillation,
and did a whole host of other miscellaneous
things to help the design
teams alter their device.”
Morris never dreamed of a career in
medical science when he started graduate
school as a signal processing
major, but it just happened that the
signal he was processing was a biological
one. “That required me to
learn about biophysics, physiology
and in particular cardiac electrophysiology,”
he recalls. “I found the material
that I was being taught really compelling
and very interesting. It struck
a chord with me and I haven’t looked
back since.” ■ 7
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