JAMES T. DRESHER SR. was known as a “turn-around artist” who improved the fate of every company he touched. As CEO of York International, a global heating and air-conditioning company in York, Pennsylvania, he took a money-losing operation to a Fortune 500 company that installed systems at several Winter Olympic games and inside the Chunnel, the tunnel connecting England and France. After retiring from York, Mr. Dresher acquired and ran Unidata, a software company based in Denver. The Dresher family also built and operated 12 McDonald’s restaurants and were early supporters of Baltimore’s Ronald McDonald House and countless other charitable organizations in the Baltimore area. Mr. Dresher, with his wife VIRGINIA, started the Dresher Foundation in 1989.
Mr. Dresher died in 1999 and Mrs. Dresher passed away in 2014. The Dresher’s children and their families remain foundation trustees.
Held by James Gammie
JAMES GAMMIE, M.D., is the James T. Dresher, Sr. Professor in Cardiac Surgery, the Co-Director and Surgical Lead of the Johns Hopkins Heart and Vascular Institute, and the Cardiac Surgeon-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins Health System. Dr. Gammie oversees the cardiac surgical clinical activity at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and our affiliated programs, as well as quality assessment and process improvement that impacts our regional, national and international referral performance and reputation. He was previously Chief of the Division of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Maryland Medical Center, where he was responsible for overseeing expansion of their cardiac programs throughout the region.
Dr. Gammie graduated from Brown University with a degree in biochemistry. He received his M.D. from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and trained in both general and cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. His clinical and research efforts have focused on the surgical treatment of heart valve disease, publishing over 200 peer-reviewed publications. He has served as a deputy editor for The Annals of Thoracic Surgery and as leader of the Access and Publications Committee of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Adult Cardiac Surgery Database. He also serves on the steering committee of the NHLBI-sponsored Cardiothoracic Surgery Trials Network (CTSN) and led the protocol development committee of a worldwide randomized tricuspid valve surgery trial. Dr. Gammie was awarded the Johns Hopkins/University of Maryland Alliance for Science and Technology Development Bio Maryland LIFE Prize in 2011 and named Entrepreneur of the Year at the University of Maryland Baltimore in 2014.
Dr. Gammie is an innovator in the mitral valve research, and recently published the world’s first clinical experience with a novel surgical repair for secondary mitral valve regurgitation that was developed in his laboratory: mitral valve translocation. He has started a Clinical Research Unit that is actively enrolling patients in over 40 clinical trials and he serves as the national surgical principal investigator for a randomized trial of a novel transcatheter tricuspid valve replacement valve.
