UB, Kaleida Health and Oishei Children’s Hospital name Lipshultz new chair of pediatrics, pediatric chief-of-service and medical director, pediatrics

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Steven E. Lipshultz, MD, Carman and Ann Adams Endowed Chair of Pediatric Research at Wayne State University School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Michigan, has been appointed the A. Conger Goodyear Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. He will also serve as the pediatric chief-of-service at Kaleida Health and the medical director, pediatrics services business development, for John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital.

In addition, Lipshultz will be president of UBMD Pediatrics.

The joint announcement was made by Michael E. Cain, MD, UB vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School; Jody L. Lomeo, president and CEO, Great Lakes Health System of WNY and Kaleida Health; and Allegra C. Jaros, president of John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital.

The appointment takes effect in November.

“Together with our partners at Kaleida Health and John R. Oishei Children’s Hospital, the Jacobs School is most pleased to welcome to Western New York such an outstanding physician-scientist,” Cain said.

After a comprehensive national search, Cain said that Lipshultz rapidly emerged as the top candidate, possessing the administrative, scientific, clinical, leadership and visionary skills needed to move the Department of Pediatrics in the Jacobs School forward, expand its translational and clinical research programs, enhance the excellence of its graduate medical education and mentored research training programs, and develop and align a comprehensive clinical program on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and in the community.

Lomeo and Jaros noted that Lipshultz’ international reputation, expertise in preclinical and clinical areas, and experience leading multicenter clinical trials will significantly enhance the quality of care for patients at Kaleida Health’s hospitals.

“Dr. Lipshultz will bring to Western New York extremely strong clinical skills coupled with tremendous leadership in pediatrics, which will significantly improve the experience for our patients,” said Lomeo. “On behalf of Great Lakes Health and Kaleida Health, we look forward to working with him.”

Jaros said: “We look forward to working with Dr. Lipshultz, and benefiting from his expertise and knowledge in all areas of pediatrics and pediatric cardiology, as well as in the improvement of health care delivery and population health.”

Cain noted that Lipshultz will be the first chair of pediatrics to be located in the Jacobs School’s new downtown home on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, just steps from Oishei Children’s Hospital, further cementing collaborations between the two institutions.

Lipshultz has been with the Children’s Research Center of Michigan since 2013 and was pediatrician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital of Michigan until 2017. He also was specialist-in-chief, pediatrics, at the Detroit Medical Center and president of University Pediatricians.

Previously, he was the inaugural holder of the George E. Batchelor Chair in Pediatrics and the Batchelor Family Pediatric Cardiology Endowed Chair at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine.

Lipshultz is credited with having helped establish the field of pediatric cardio-oncology and has been principal investigator of several landmark National Institutes of Health (NIH) studies on the causes and treatment of cardiomyopathy in children. His clinical studies have established the efficacy of therapies that can prevent heart disease in children with HIV.

He also uses comparative genomics and proteomics to study the development of pediatric cardiomyopathy.

As a scientific leader, Lipshultz chairs the medical advisory board and scientific review committee of the Children’s Cardiomyopathy Foundation Inc., a national non-profit organization he helped found that is dedicated to finding causes and cures for pediatric cardiomyopathy. He has chaired the cardiomyopathy working group for the World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Disease project supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He has received a congressional commendation for leading a coalition task force to improve the outcomes for children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the state of pediatric health care in the Ukraine.

Lipshultz also conducts research aimed at improving health care services and population health, and in reducing health disparities among racial, ethnic and minority populations. His interests include enhancing preventive medicine to transform health care systems. For more than two decades, he has been the principal investigator of numerous large NIH international registries and research projects that have developed and implemented evidence-based clinical practices that have resulted in marked improvements in health care delivery and population health. His research programs have received considerable funding, with his group among the top 2 percent of NIH-funded investigators in 2010 and the top 1 percent of scientists globally on the Essential Science Indicators (Thompson Reuters, 2016) rankings.

The author or co-author of more than 650 peer-reviewed manuscripts, chapters, review articles and textbooks, he has also been an invited lecturer, reviewer and advisory board member for numerous organizations. He is the editor-in-chief or associate editor of several medical journals and was invited to be the founding editor-in-chief of a new journal, Cardio-Oncology, in the field he helped to create.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned a Master of Arts in biology, Lipshultz received his MD from Dartmouth Medical School and completed a pediatrics residency at the Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, in the  Department of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. At Children’s Hospital in Boston, he completed both a fellowship in clinical cardiology and a research cardiology fellowship at the American Heart Association-Bugher Foundation Centers for Molecular Biology in the Cardiovascular System. Lipshultz is a diplomate of the American Board of Pediatrics with a lifetime certification in general pediatrics.