New Division Chiefs Named
to Department of Medicine

New division chiefs have been named in the Department of Medicine at the Miller School, and one is overseeing a newly created division, the Division of Hospital Medicine.

“This is an exciting time, with 80 active recruitments under way as we continue to build on the strengths of the faculty already in place,” says Marc Lippman, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine. “We are creating an environment and providing resources to our new and existing faculty that will allow them to impact the future of medicine.”

The Division of Hospital Medicine is headed by Amir K. Jaffer, M.D., who served as associate section head for hospital medicine for ten years at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

“Hospital medicine as a specialty has only been around ten years, but it is already one of the fastest growing fields in medicine,” says Jaffer. “The opportunity to build a division from the ground up, especially in an academic setting where we can carefully study outcomes, is very exciting.”

The division’s physicians serve as “hospitalists,” or the main doctor who oversees and coordinates a patient’s care while hospitalized.

Paul Martin, M.D., is now chief of the Division of Hepatology. Most recently he was associate chief of liver diseases at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

“The Miller School has an unparalleled reputation in liver diseases, and under the direction of Dr. Eugene Schiff, the Center for Liver Diseases has grown into a national and international mecca for hepatology,” says Martin. “The health system’s incredible liver transplant program fits perfectly with my own interest in the management of hepatitis in patients undergoing a transplant and how to keep the new liver from being infected.”

The Division of Gastroenterology is now being run by a Miller School alum, Maria Abreu, M.D. Not only did she attend UM, but she was in the “baby doc program,” receiving her B.S. and M.D. in 1990 after just six years of study. Abreu is considered a leading authority on inflammatory bowel disease and the regulation of receptors that recognize bacteria in intestinal cells. Most recently she was the director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

“I want the division to truly move the field forward in terms of basic science research and clinical care, not only in inflammatory bowel disease but in other areas such as GI cancer,” says Abreu.

A basic and clinical research enterprise for kidney disease and drug discovery will be the cornerstone of the Division of Nephrology under new chief Jochen Reiser, M.D., Ph.D., who promises “landmark research and groundbreaking drug discovery paired with excellence in patient care.” He joins the Miller School from the Nephrology Division at Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard Medical School.

“One of our main goals is to understand renal diseases on a molecular level and perform cutting-edge research that aids the development of kidney-specific drugs,” explains Reiser. “We have a wealth of model systems for renal diseases and will use them to screen with libraries of chemical compounds and RNAi and analyze which of them have an impact. From there we move on to animal studies and clinical trials.”

Eleven years after joining the Miller School faculty, Matthias Salathe, M.D., has taken the helm of the Division of Pulmon­ary and Critical Care Medicine. (He served as interim chief for the past year.)

“Our immediate plan is to expand our basic science and translational research, especially in the area of emerging pathogens and how they impact airway-related diseases such as cystic fibrosis and chronic bronchitis,” says Salathe.