The research director of the Center for Resuscitation Science at HUP, he studies the clinical care of cardiac arrest victims, with an emphasis on improving quality and training of CPR, and the use of therapeutic hypothermia to extend survival times for cardiac arrest patients. “One of the really important lessons I’ve learned from our work is that death is not this binary yes-or-no thing that we used to think it was,” Abella says. “Death is more of a gradual transition. There really is something called ‘somewhat dead’ or ‘mostly dead,’ as opposed to ‘completely dead.’ Death is not such a set-in-stone border that can never be crossed again — which is really a tremendous and humbling thought.”