My name is Jeff Vergales. I'm a pediatric cardiologist.

I am what's called a non-invasive cardiologist so my area of expertise is in ultrasound technique, so we are very big in diagnosing and managing congenital heart disease patients through the use of imaging. That means a mom who is pregnant, doing high level fetal ultrasounds in order to fully delineate the anatomy of the baby before they're born, or after babies are born being able to put together the pieces of how their heart was put together through the use of ultrasound.

Cardiology was where I really wanted to end up. Kids wanted to just be children and for the most part, even though this is incredibly common for them to have congenital heart defects, you don't usually notice that and that became a very rewarding part for me. That became an area that I then could focus in on that there's a child that has a completely normal outlook on life, even though on the inside they don't look the way that most of us do.

Our group works incredibly closely together and that is not something that is necessarily found at all major children's heart centers because you have a big group of people that all have various different interests. So at UVA, that's one of the best parts of what we do is the fact that we've assembled a team that is really focused on managing the patient from start to finish. Whatever that start and finish is, sometimes we don't exactly know, but we know it's not just the start of a surgery and the end of a surgery, the start of a hospitalization and the end. It's really the start of the entire care of that child from birth to when they're off, ready to become an adult.