Mission Statement

The Mount Sinai Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine is based on the traditional fundamental triad of academic medicine, namely: patient care, teaching, and research. The goals of the Division are:

• To provide state-of-the-art clinical care to patients with all forms of lung disease and critical illness.
• To serve as an educational resource for The Mount Sinai / NYU Health System and other institutions in teaching pulmonary and critical care medicine to medical students, medical residents, fellows, established physicians, and allied health professionals.
• To perform cutting-edge research in many important areas including asthma and emphysema, lung cancer, sarcoidosis, collagen vascular diseases, pulmonary infections, occupational lung diseases, and critical care outcomes.

Division History

There is a long tradition of excellence in the study of pulmonary disease and critical care at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, shared equally by internists and surgeons. Drs. Harry Wessler and Herman Hennel's studies in suppurative lung disease culminated in Dr. Coleman Rabin's landmark work in the treatment of putrid lung abscess in the 1930s. During the following three decades, Dr. Louis Siltzbach's research vastly expanded our current knowledge of the diagnosis, course, and treatment of sarcoidosis. Simultaneously, Dr. Irving Selikoff was following years of important study in pulmonary tuberculosis with major advances in the growing subject of environmental lung disease. Dr. Selikoff's contributions led to the establishment of one of the nation's foremost centers for environmental medicine at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. The renowned surgeons, Drs. Lilienthal, Neuhof, Touroff, Aufses, and Sarot, were among the first to perform thoracotomy, lung resection, pleurectomy, pulmonary embolectomy and cardiac surgery successfully. Dr. Shoemaker pioneered surgical critical care medicine and modeled the future of surgical intensive care training.

The current full-time faculty has continued this tradition of excellence and blended many components into a modern Division which includes a clinical consultation service, pulmonary function and sleep laboratories, bronchoscopy suite, Medical Intensive Care Unit, Respiratory Care Unit, General Chest Medicine Clinic, Sarcoidosis Program, Asthma Center, and research laboratories in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and physiology. Graduates of our fellowship program are directors of divisions of pulmonary and critical care medicine throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.