Genomics expert is Yale chief of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine

Dr. Naftali Kaminski, an internationally renowned expert in genomics of lung disease, biomarker discovery and pulmonary fibrosis from the University of Pittsburgh, joins the Yale School of Medicine faculty this month as a professor of medicine, and chief of the Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.

Dr. Naftali Kaminski, an internationally renowned expert in genomics of lung disease, biomarker discovery and pulmonary fibrosis from the University of Pittsburgh, joins the Yale School of Medicine faculty this month as a professor of medicine, and chief of the Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine.

Dr. Naftali Kaminski

Kaminski comes from University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (UPSOM), where he was the endowed chair for pulmonary research, and a tenured professor of medicine, pathology, computational biology and human genetics. He was the founding director of the Dorothy P. and Richard P. Simmons Center for Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD), which under his leadership became one of the most prominent centers for care, diagnosis and research in ILD.

Yale has a combination of outstanding basic and translational science, and it offered the opportunity to grow and develop world-class clinical programs,” Dr. Kaminski said. “We have no doubt that Yale will be both a research and a clinical destination for patients with both common disorders such as asthma, COPD and sleep-disordered breathing, and the less common diseases such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and sarcoidosis—or even the rare genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis,” he added.

Kaminski’s main research interests involve applying genomic approaches to elucidate basic mechanisms and improve diagnosis and treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a chronic scarring lung disease, as well as such diseases as severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), severe asthma and sarcoidosis.

Prior to assuming his position as director of the Simmons Center, Kaminski was an attending pulmonary physician at the Sheba Medical Center, in Tel Hasomer, Israel, the largest medical center in the Israel, and headed that institution’s Functional Genomics Center.

Kaminski earned his medical degree at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem. He completed his residency at Hadassah Mount-Scopus University Hospital in Jerusalem, and a pulmonary fellowship at Sheba Medical Center in Israel. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lung Biology Center at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, and trained in functional genomics and microarray technology at the Functional Genomics Laboratory at Roche Bioscience, Palo-Alto, California, where he pioneered the application of gene expression arrays to chronic lung disease.

Dr. Jack Elias, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said Kaminski “is one of the world’s leaders in genome investigations of the lung and will add impressively to our programs.”

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Helen Dodson: helen.dodson@yale.edu, 203-436-3984