Dr. Michael Niederman accepts the Murray Kornfeld Memorial Founders Award from Dr. Barbara Phillips, immediate past-president of the American College of Chest Physicians. Photo credit: Bob Rabito
Dr. Michael Niederman, associate chief and clinical director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has won the Murray Kornfeld Memorial Founders Award from the American College of Chest Physicians for a career spent advancing the treatment and management of pneumonia.
The award is conferred to a leader in pulmonary and critical care medicine, particularly in infection and inflammation, who is developing therapies expected to guide medicine into the future. Dr. Niederman, who is also a professor of clinical medicine, received his award and spoke about his work Oct. 26 at the college’s annual conference.
“I think it’s a very important award for both the American College of Chest Physicians and the individual that receives it,” Dr. Niederman said. “And I was thrilled that they were giving me recognition for what I had done, and giving me an opportunity to talk about it with my peers.”
In his lecture “Two decades of guidelines for pneumonia: a step forward?” Dr. Niederman detailed the evolution of standards for treating and managing pneumonia in a medical setting, and raised questions about the efficacy of future pneumonia guidelines. “The guidelines, while they’ve improved things, have become complicated,” Dr. Niederman said, citing variations in treatment and management across dissimilar communities in the United States and around the globe. “The next step is to make guidelines more widely available but more simplified than they’ve become.”
Dr. Niederman served as senior author and co-chair of the guidelines committee for the American Thoracic Society’s 1993 and 2001 guidelines for the treatment of community-acquired pneumonia. He also co-chaired the committees that wrote guidelines for the treatment of nosocomial pneumonia in 1995 and 2005. His interests include respiratory tract infections, including mechanisms of airway colonization; the management of community and hospital-acquired pneumonia; the role of guidelines for pneumonia; and the impact of antibiotic resistance on the management and outcomes of respiratory tract infections. He joined the Weill Cornell Medicine faculty in 2015.
“I was thrilled to come to Weill Cornell Medicine and join the Weill Department of Medicine and Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine to advance the course of patient care, education of our next generation of physicians, and to advance translational investigation.”