Boehringer Ingelheim Professor is expert on the genomics of pulmonary diseases

Naftali Kaminski, M.D., an expert on the genomics of lung disease, biomarker discovery, and pulmonary fibrosis, has joined the School of Medicine as Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Professor of Medicine and chief of the Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine.

Kaminski’s research interests involve applying genomic approaches to elucidate basic mechanisms and improve diagnosis and treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic scarring lung disease, as well as such diseases as severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), severe asthma, and sarcoidosis. Among his group’s recent discoveries are the role of microRNAs in lung fibrosis and the identification of novel molecular and genetic biomarkers in pulmonary fibrosis.

Kaminski comes to Yale from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he held an endowed chair for pulmonary research and was professor of medicine, pathology, computational biology, and human genetics, and founding director of the Dorothy P. and Richard P. Simmons Center for Interstitial Lung Disease.

Kaminski received his medical degree from the Hebrew University–Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, Israel. He completed his residency at the Hadassah Mount Scopus University Hospital in Jerusalem, and his pulmonary fellowship at Sheba Medical Center in Israel. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lung Biology Center in the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California–San Francisco.