Ferkol new president-elect of thoracic society

Ferkol

Thomas W. Ferkol, MD, the Alexis Hartmann, MD, Professor of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been installed as president-elect of the American Thoracic Society (ATS).

He will serve in this post through May 2014, at which time he will be elevated to ATS president for one year. He was installed during the society’s international conference in May.

ATS is an international organization with a membership of more than 15,000 academic pulmonary scientists and clinicians.

Ferkol, who also is a professor of cell biology and physiology, is the director of the Division of Pediatric Allergy, Immunology, and Pulmonary Medicine and past director of the Cystic Fibrosis Center. He has been at the university since 2000.

Ferkol is an American Lung Association Edward Livingston Trudeau Scholar and recipient of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) LeRoy Matthews Physician-Scientist Award.

His research has focused on characterizing genetic and molecular factors that contribute to airway involvement in cystic fibrosis and primary ciliary dyskinesia, a rare disease that causes chronic respiratory infections. He is an investigator for the Genetic Disorders of Mucociliary Clearance Consortium, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and has assembled a clinical, biomedical and engineering research collaborative at Washington University to study the genetic and phenotypic spectrum of ciliopathies.

Since joining the ATS in 1995, Ferkol has been active in the Scientific Assembly on Pediatrics, having served as assembly chair and chair of its program committee. He oversees the ATS Finance Committee, among other roles with the organization. He has been a member of several scientific review groups, including the NIH Gene and Drug Delivery Systems study section, ATS Career Development Grants Review Committee, CFF Research Development Program Review Committee, and CFF Functional Genomics Review Committee.

Ferkol earned a medical degree from the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He completed residency training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and received his fellowship training in pediatric pulmonology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, after which he joined the pediatric faculty there.


Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient-care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.