The Department of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine is pleased to announce that Erica Herzog, MD, PhD, has been appointed section chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine (PCCSM), effective October 1, 2026.
In this role, Dr. Herzog will focus on strengthening PCCSM’s culture of community and collaboration; expanding ambulatory care; and cultivating basic, translational, and electronic health record-based research within the section.
The John Slade Ely Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary) and professor of pathology, Dr. Herzog is a clinically active physician-scientist who brings decades of engaged and principled leadership to her new role. Her laboratory's groundbreaking research identifies intervenable mechanisms of injury, repair, and remodeling in the adult lung. Her pioneering use of engineering-based organotypic modeling systems, human-relevant mouse models, and real-world clinical cohorts facilitated paradigm-shifting insights that are in various stages of clinical development with the goal of improving the lives of people living with pulmonary fibrosis.
As founding director of the Yale Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) Center of Excellence, Dr. Herzog and her team transformed the Yale-ILD program from a regional referral center into an international destination for ILD care. Seminal innovations include disease-specific multidisciplinary programs in rare diseases, implementation of disease-specific quality measures, initiatives designed to provide patients with improved access to care, participation in landmark clinical trials, and opportunities for engagement and advocacy at the national level. Together, these efforts have made Yale-ILD a model of collaboration between Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and Yale New Haven Hospital, staffed by expert physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, pharmacists, and support staff who provide patients and their families with a seamless clinical experience characterized by state-of-the-art, compassionate, and patient-centered care.
Dr. Herzog has a decades-long commitment to building the physician-scientist pipeline. As associate dean of medical student research, she worked with educational stakeholders to co-lead the development of a new research curriculum for medical students, strengthened support for mentors, and bolstered the MD thesis requirement. As co-director of the Medical Research Scholars Program, she oversees translational research training for graduate students interested in research careers at the interface between laboratory science and clinical medicine. In her own laboratory, she has cultivated the careers of numerous mentees who have gone on to establish their own independent careers as pulmonary-fibrosis-oriented physician-scientists at academic centers, group leaders in industry, and outstanding practitioners in community practice.
Dr. Herzog’s contributions to science and medicine have been recognized with a Parker B. Francis Award from the Francis Family Foundation, the Jo Rae Wright Award and Scientific Accomplishment Award from the American Thoracic Society, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since 2005, Dr. Herzog is currently a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and an emeritus member of the Interurban Clinical Club.
Dr. Herzog earned her undergraduate and medical school degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Following residency at Mount Sinai Medical Center, in New York City, she completed a combined pulmonary fellowship and PhD training in the Investigative Medicine Program at YSM. She was appointed to the faculty in 2005 and has risen through the ranks to her current appointment as professor of medicine and pathology in 2020.
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