Pulmonary Medicine

Welcome to the Division of Pulmonary Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Our mission is to provide exceptional clinical care for all patients with respiratory ailments and concerns, inspirational teaching at all levels of this subspecialty, and excellent clinical and translational research opportunities to expand biomedical knowledge of respiratory function and disease.

Having recently commenced a significant resurrection with new leadership, the Division is fully committed to upholding and enhancing this vision by integrating the missions of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center and recruiting outstanding clinician-teachers, clinical scholars, and physician-scientists. We have added faculty in emerging fields, such as interventional pulmonary medicine, sleep medicine, early lung cancer detection, and other areas.

One of the Division's clinical strengths is the broad spectrum of conditions and diseases we comprehensively identify and treat. These include: asthma, cough, COPD, sleep disorders, environmental and interstitial lung diseases, lung nodule and tumor evaluation, infections, sleep-related disorders, rare diseases of the chest, and more. In an effort to optimize patient care, we collaborate in a multidisciplinary fashion, regularly interacting with other services, particularly internal medicine and subspecialties, thoracic surgery, medical and radiation oncology, and transplant medicine. Our Interventional Pulmonary Medicine Program is state-of-art, and includes the most advanced technologies available in New York City and its environs. Sleep Medicine laboratory is also expanding at Montefiore's Moses Division and our Pulmonary Function laboratory is poised for expansion at the Moses and Weiler Divisions.

Our teaching program is robust, with four new fellows entering each year. Our three-year combined Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship program encompasses a diverse range of patient diagnoses, research opportunities, and rotation environments - including Montefiore Medical Center's Moses Division, Weiler Division, Jacobi Medical Center, a large municipal hospital. Publications on clinical series routinely emerge from these encounters, and we also offer the opportunity to pursue additional formal training in clinical research through the AECOM masters level degrees in Clinical Research.

The Division's research endeavors have historically been physiologically and clinically oriented. Long-term members of our faculty have published seminal papers in hypoxia, cough, environmental lung disease, sickle cell chest disease, and sleep medicine, with much of the work ongoing. Currently new investigative efforts are focused on lung cancer detection biomarkers, as the Spivack laboratory now located in Einstein's spectacular new Price Center for Genomic & Translational Medicine is generating novel noninvasive exfoliated and exhaled molecular approaches to measuring gene dysregulation that can be used for tracking early lung disease processes (i.e. carcinogenesis and inflammation) in ambulatory patients; other new studies include ethnicity and race disparities in lung cancer provision; sleep-related cardiovascular morbidity and mortality; and nascient research endeavors in airway interventional approaches, and other areas.

This is indeed a very exciting time in our Division's history. Colleagues, visitors, and most importantly, patients stand to benefit greatly. On behalf of our faculty and staff, I invite you to learn more about our Division and individual physicians and programs, by further exploring this site to see how you may become part of our legacy.

Simon D. Spivack, MD, MPH
Division Chief and Associate Professor
Medicine, Epidemiology, and Genetics
Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine