The University of Pittsburgh has awarded the title of Distinguished Professor to three McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine affiliated faculty members. The new Distinguished Professors are: Derek C. Angus, Distinguished Professor of Critical Care Medicine; Ivet Bahar, Distinguished Professor of Computational and Systems Biology; and David H. Perlmutter, Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics.
The rank of Distinguished Professor acknowledges extraordinary, internationally recognized scholarly attainment in an individual discipline or field. Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg made the appointments based on the recommendations of Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Patricia E. Beeson.
Derek C. Angus, MD, the Mitchell P. Fink Chair in Critical Care Medicine in the School of Medicine, conducts research into the clinical, epidemiologic, and translational aspects of sepsis and the related syndromes of pneumonia, acute lung injury, and multisystem organ failure, as well as the optimal delivery of acute care and intensive care services.
Dr. Angus has led multiple large National Institutes of Health (NIH) studies and published several hundred papers, including articles in JAMA, the Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
He joined the Department of Anesthesiology in 1991. He has been chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine since 2009.
Ivet Bahar, PhD, is the founding chair of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology in the School of Medicine. Her research focuses on structure-based modeling of biomolecular machinery and on understanding how complex macromolecules interact and execute their biological functions. The examination of these structure-based systems using quantitative tools has broad applicability in emerging fields, such as polypharmacology and personalized medicine.
In 2001, she joined Pitt as a faculty member in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry.
Dr. Bahar’s work bridges multiple disciplines, including biophysics, computational biology, structural biology, engineering, cell biology, oncology, and pharmacology. She has published more than 200 scientific articles and coauthored 13 book chapters. Her articles have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Chemical Biology, PLoS Computational Biology, and Biophysics Journal.
She also is the associate director of the Drug Discovery Institute and co-director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s molecular and systems modeling core. She is the founding director of the Pitt/Carnegie Mellon joint PhD program in computational biology.
David H. Perlmutter, MD is recognized as an authority on alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency, the most common genetic cause of liver disease in children.
In the last 8 years, Dr. Perlmutter has completed 12 NIH-funded research projects on which he served as principal investigator. He has published more than 170 articles in scientific and medical journals and books.
Dr. Perlmutter joined the University in 2001 as chair of the Department of Pediatrics and the Vira I. Heinz Professor. He holds a secondary appointment in cell biology and is scientific director and physician-in-chief of Children’s Hospital.
He was instrumental in the development and funding of the Biliary Atresia Research Consortium, a multicenter study of pediatric liver disease.
He has served as president of the Society for Pediatric Research and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine.