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Department of Pediatrics
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This was an exceptional year for the Department of Pediatrics. Most notably, research accomplishments have reached an all-time high. Including National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding that goes through Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, University of Pittsburgh and Magee-Womens Research Institute; the department now has $20.8 million per year in grants from the NIH. When the total NIH funding of Children’s |
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Hospital and the department are considered, we now rank ninth in the country among all departments of pediatrics (whether they report funding through a children’s hospital or a university). Notable among the new grants were two major U01 awards to Alejandro Hoberman, MD (chief, General Academic Pediatrics), for large clinical trials in the area of otitis media and urinary tract infections and one major R01 award to Robert Squires Jr., MD (clinical director, Gastroenterology), for a multicenter study of acute liver failure in children. What is even more astonishing are some of the new grants that were awarded in September 2006 after the period covered by our first annual report—a new $12.8 million Specialized Center of Clinically Oriented Research (SCCOR) award to Jay Kolls, MD (chief, Pulmonary Medicine, Allergy and Immunology), a new K12 Child Health Research Center award, and many new investigator-initiated awards. This department now has more than 400 funded research projects, an increase that is tenfold what it was in 2001.
The clinical and educational programs of the department also are humming. With some of its highest patient satisfaction scores, the pediatric subspecialty practices of the department saw increases in activity of more than 8.5 percent. Moreover, there has been steady improvement in providing the community timely access to our pediatric subspecialty expertise. The residency and fellowship training programs continued their growth and the quality of their work as well. Members of the faculty and specific divisions have been actively engaged in a number of activities as advocates for the health care needs of the children of Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania.
With all of these things working together with incredible support from Children’s Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, the department also was able to improve the lives of its faculty again. This year, faculty compensation rose by 24.5 percent. Compared with the 2002 fiscal year, faculty compensation increased by 64.2 percent in the 2006 fiscal year. The department also reached an all-time high in its profitability and was able to create a new endowed chair, the UPMC Niels K. Jerne Chair in Pediatrics, that will be awarded in the coming months.
I hope you will enjoy reading about all of the other remarkable Department of Pediatrics’ faculty accomplishments at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in this annual report for 2005–2006. Sincerely,
David H. Perlmutter, MD
Vira I. Heinz Professor and Chair
Department of Pediatrics
Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Physician-in-Chief and Scientific Director
Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
