As part of our “Meet Yale Internal Medicine” series, today’s featured physician is Andrey Zinchuk, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine).
Twenty years ago, Andrey Zinchuk, MD, was working as a chemical engineer in Groton, Connecticut, designing mechanisms to deliver medications in a better way. He felt the work was interesting and exciting, but something was missing.
“I love people,” explained Zinchuk. “What I was doing had an indirect impact on people. I know this is cliché for most people who end up in medical school, but at that point of time, I was at a crossroads. Do I pursue a PhD in engineering and continue with a pharmaceutical career or do I change gears and try something that will enable me to directly impact people’s lives? I was done writing grants.”
That ‘new gear’ for Zinchuk was medical school, a path pursued by both of his physician parents. His mother is a neonatologist; his father was a radiologist. Zinchuk’s family emigrated from Ukraine when he was 14. He watched his mother pass her boards in the U.S. and complete her residency, while his older brother worked to support the family.
After completing medical school in Connecticut, Zinchuk relocated to Boston for his residency.
He began training in neurology, which “lended itself to an engineering mind.” But during his year of internal medicine training, he treated a patient with lung and heart failure and loved the physiology.
“The heart and lungs are intimately connected, and a lot of the physiology models in medicine are really based on the principles that I learned and loved in my engineering training. When I was in medical school, I would derive a lot of the physiology equations from scratch using the engineering principles to understand key relationships, such as between heart wall stress and blood flow or between airway resistance and flow,” explained Zinchuk. “To me, it made a lot of sense. I love that a system’s response to a challenge can tell you a lot about how that system works. That is super interesting.”
New leadership was starting at the fast-growing Yale School of Medicine (YSM) Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine (Yale-PCCSM) and Zinchuk’s interest was piqued. Returning to Connecticut also brought him closer to family.
“Yale was a growing program, and Naftali [Kaminski] was the new section chief. They just built a new ICU and had a great sleep fellowship. It seemed like a perfect match. A large ICU in a city that's providing tertiary care to the local population,” said Zinchuk. “When I interviewed here, the people were incredible. Everyone was extremely kind. Genuine. People felt supported by the mentors and colleagues. Those were the things that I was really looking for.”
Upon his arrival, he joined forces with his future mentor, Klar Yaggi, MD, MPH, BA, and dove into sleep research. “This was a perfect intersection between engineering, neurology, and pulmonary physiology.”
Zinchuk joined the faculty in 2017. He splits his time between research and caring for patients in the intensive care unit and Yale New Haven Hospital’s Sleep Medicine Center. In February 2020, he was lead author on “Physiological Traits and Adherence to Obstructive Sleep Apnea Treatment in Patients with Stroke” in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, in which his team found that certain phenotypes may help predict whether a sleep apnea patient can successfully use a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device for treatment of their condition.
Looking at his career trajectory, his goal is “to reduce suffering and improve people’s quality of life.” He knows that sounds generic, but that is what led him into medicine in the first place.
“Whether that is through seeing patients, and doing work that's impactful immediately, or through changing the paradigm of how we think about treating and personalizing therapy for sleep apnea, the goal is the same,” he said.
The irony is that he’s back to writing grants. And enjoying it.
“I’ve come full circle,” Zinchuk said. “Writing grants and papers is a big chunk of what I do now. They allow me to work on answering a question that has the most impact, and that is ‘How?’ Knowing how things work can help us care for patients now and change paradigms for doing it better in the future.”
The Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine is one of the eleven sections within YSM’s Department of Internal Medicine. To learn more about Yale-PCCSM, visit PCCSM’s website, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.