The COPD Program

Dr. Kurz is a member a member of the advanced airways disease program and the current director of the COPD clinic. He obtained his MD and PhD in Microbiology from Julius-Maximilians University Wuerzburg, Germany. He underwent residency training at CWRU Cleveland, where he also completed a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine. He has a focus on complex structural lung disease, inflammatory airways disease, and lung infections with clinical experience in mycobacterial lung disease, including tuberculosis and its sequelae, NTM and bronchiectasis, complex pleuropulmonary and airway infections. His research focuses on identification of novel antibiotic combinations to treat resistant mycobacteria. He is board certified in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. He is a fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians (FCCP), member of the American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society.

Dr. Rochester received her undergraduate degree from Smith College (1979), and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (1983). She completed her internship and residency in internal medicine (1984-1986) and two years of post-graduate pulmonary fellowship at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (1986-1988). She furthered her fellowship training in the Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep at Yale University School of Medicine (1998-1991), and joined the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine in 1991. She is currently Professor of Medicine, and Director of Yale COPD Program at Yale University School of Medicine, and Director of the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Program at VA Connecticut Healthcare System. She is the Chair of the Yale-New Haven Health System COPD Consensus Group in the YNHHS Care Signature Team, and together with the multidisciplinary YNHHS COPD Consensus working group members and Dr. Nancy Kim, developed the inpatient COPD care pathway that was newly implemented in May 2021. She and the COPD Consensus working group collaborate with the YNHHS Quality and Safety team on processes to improve care of people with COPD and efforts to reduce hospital readmissions due to COPD.  In 2020, the Yale COPD Program was recognized as an official Clinical Resource Center for the Alpha-1-Foundation, to provide specialty care for individuals with alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency. Dr. Rochester also directs the Yale Medical Students' Respiratory Pathophysiology curriculum in the Homeostasis Master Course and is involved in multiple other aspects of medical education at Yale.  She was nominated for the 2020-2021 academic year Bohmfalk Teaching award, and received the 2021 Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Postgraduate Fellows' teaching award. In addition to her extensive clinical and teaching responsibilities, Dr. Rochester conducts clinical research in the fields of Pulmonary Rehabilitation (PR) and COPD.  Areas of research interest include the role of transcutaneous electrical muscle stimulation as a muscle training technique in PR for patients with COPD, the impact of medical comorbidities on the outcomes of PR,  the benefits of PR for patients with disorders other than COPD, impact of PR on home-based patient activity, and the varying clinical phenotypes of COPD.  She has participated in several multi-center clinical trials in COPD, including the ECLIPSE Study and the IMPACT Study (sponsored by Glaxo-Smith-Kline), the UPLIFT Study (sponsored by Boehringer-Ingelheim), the GALATHEA Study (sponsored by Astra-Zeneca, Inc.), and others. She is a member of the Northeast Pulmonary Rehabilitation Consortium, a group of PR providers who conduct outcomes research in PR.Dr. Rochester is a longstanding and active member of the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and the European Respiratory Society (ERS). She has served in multiple leadership roles in the ATS over the years, including as Chair of the Assembly of Pulmonary Rehabilitation and invited member of the ATS Board of Directors (2015-2017), and remains a member of the Executive Committee of the ATS Pulmonary Rehabilitation Assembly. She has served on the task forces and writing committees of numerous Official Society Statements and Guidelines on pulmonary rehabilitation (ATS, ERS, American College of Chest Physicians and American College of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation). Most recently, she was the ATS Co-Chair of the Task Force that developed the ATS/ERS Official Policy Statement: Enhancing Implementation, Use and Delivery of Pulmonary Rehabilitation (American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 2015; 192(11)1373-86). She is actively involved in national and international advocacy to expand access to pulmonary rehabilitation for those likely to benefit from it. She is a member of the COPD Foundation CBQC Working Group on Physical Activity. She currently serves on the Planning and Evaluation and Quality Improvement and Implementation Committees of the ATS. She lectures nationally and internationally on the topics of COPD and pulmonary rehabilitation.

I did my PhD in microbiology and molecular biology in The University of Queensland, Australia. During my PhD I worked and published on a variety of projects including developing a new lentiviral vector based on JDV (Jembrana Disease Virus), translational regulation in HCV by small RNA-binding molecules and the viral core protein, and RNA-protein interactions in positive strand RNA viruses. During this time I was also involved in cloning the Australian isolate of HCV with Dr Eric Gowans. My findings in these projects were published in a variety of journal including PNAS, Hepatology, and Journal of Molecular Biology.My next stop was a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Harry Noller at the RNA Center in UCSC where I delved deeper into the RNA world and studied the helicase activity of the ribosome during translation. Our work was well received and published in Cell.I started my Internal Medicine residency at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo in 2003. During the last year of my residency I took part in a research project led by Dr Sands on the role of TIMP-1 in reactive airway disease. Our work was published in Clinical Immunology. I was then recruited to the Pulmonary Critical Care Fellowship at Yale in 2007, and worked with Dr J Elias to set up a platform for analyzing the role of microRNAs in the lung disease using the transgenic models that have been developed in his lab. I started this work on an inducible, lung-specific, VEGF transgenic model and within the first year of the project found a microRNA that was regulated by VEGF and mediated the effects of this cytokine in the lung. Based on these findings we filed a patent on the diagnostic and therapeutic use of miR-1 in lung disease. I received a K99/R00 award in the third year of my clinical fellowship for my work on this project. I was directly recruited as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Yale Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Section at the end of my fellowship.I started the R00 phase of my grant in 2014. I established my lab in the Pulmonary and Critical Care Section at Yale and was given a secondary appointment in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Focusing on the role of endothelial gene regulation in injury, I collaborated with Dr. P Lee a Yale to show that VEGF is a part of a TLR4-driven protective pathway in the lung endothelium. We showed the significance of this pathway in a variety of endothelial-specific models and published the results in FASEB journal in 2015. In the next phase, we developed vector-based and transgenic models for endothelial-cell-specific miRNA expression and showed that miR-1 effects on inflammation and remodeling are due to its specific role in the lung endothelium. I started a collaboration with Yale Thoracic Interventional and Yale Thoracic Oncology programs on lung cancer and showed that miR-1 is a predictor of lung cancer survival and is regulated in tumor endothelial cells. As a part of this work we also set up several lung cancer models in the lab, including the KRAS mutant/P53 knockout mouse model I was awarded the American Lung Association Cancer Discovery Award in 2013, presented my findings at ATS in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and published a manuscript describing these results in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM) in 2017.I have followed my molecular studies on miR-1 in several directions. Our studies on the role of miR-1 in tumor endothelium has led to the identification of a novel non-templated addition (NTA) enzymatic pathway. We also found that PI3 kinase/Akt pathway controls miR-1 levels in the endothelium. We presented these findings at the Keystone symposium on “MicroRNAs and Noncoding RNAs,” at the “Lung Development, Injury and Repair” Gordon Research Conference in 2016, at the ATS in 2016, 2017, and 2018. We have continued our studies on the role of miR-1 in the tumor stroma and found that it is regulated in the cancerization field. The preliminary results from these studies were presented at ATS 2018 and 2019. Following the specific role of miR-1 in the endothelium, we used our vascular specific miRNA expression models to probe the specific roles of endothelial miR-1 in airway inflammation. We also developed an Argonaute 2 cross-linking and immunoprecipitation (Ago-CLIP) method to identify novel miR-1 targets through miRISC analysis. Using these two methods we showed that isolated overexpression of miR-1 in the lung endothelium significantly decreases the severity of airway inflammation and mediates this mechanism through downregulation of eosinophil trafficking genes. Also, through our collaboration with Yale Center for Asthma and Airway Disease (YCAAD), and the Ear Nose Throat Department at Yale, we showed the significance of this miRNA-regulated gene network in human asthma and chronic rhinosinusitis. These findings were published in Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (JACI) in 2020. Since starting my tenure track position in 2010 I have been awarded the AAP (American Association of Physicians) Junior Investigator Award, ALA Lung Cancer Discovery Award, NIH/NIAID R56 award , ATS R to R award, and a DOD Lung Cancer Idea Development award. We have published our work on asthma and Th2 inflammation in Journal of Experimental Medicine, and Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, our work on non-small cell lung caner tumor endothelium and cancer progression in the American journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, and our work on the role of endothelium in lung injury in FASEB journal.  I have recruited and worked with five postdoctoral fellows, four Associate Research Scientists, and four students over the last seven years. My research currently focuses on the role of vascular non-coding RNAs in cancer, lung injury and airway inflammation.

Sritika Thapa completed her Sleep Medicine Fellowship at Yale University and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine fellowship from the Medstar Georgetown University/ Washington Hospital Center program in Washington DC. Prior to her fellowship training she was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an instructor of medicine. She completed her medical residency training at Medstar Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore Maryland and her Medical School training from Universal College of Medical Sciences in Nepal. Her clinical interests primarily includes complex sleep disordered breathing, the overlap between sleep and obstructive lung disease and non-invasive ventilators.