Patrick M. Kochanek MD, MCCM

Dr. Kochanek is Director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research and is a tenured Professor in the Department of Critical Care Medicine with secondary appointments in Pediatrics and Anesthesiology. He is also one of the Vice Chairmen of Critical Care Medicine. Dr. Kochanek received his MD from the University of Chicago in 1980. After a residency in pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego he did a pediatric critical care fellowship at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. During his fellowship, he trained in the area of experimental brain ischemia under Dr. John Hallenbeck at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Dr. Kochanek has been a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh since 1986. He has directed the highly successful Pediatric Critical Care Medicine research effort and since 1994, has followed in the footsteps of the renowned Dr. Peter Safar as the Director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research. Dr. Kochanek’s major research focus is on mechanisms of secondary damage after severe traumatic brain injury. His bench to bedside work in this area has been continuously supported by NINDS/NIH since 1995. Among his accomplishments, he was named the first Established Investigator of the Society of Critical Care Medicine in 1993, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine in 2000 and is on the Editorial Boards of both Critical Care Medicine and the Journal of Neurotrauma. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research and on the Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Under his leadership, the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research has continued to grow and is an inter-departmental resource with over 14 million dollars of extramural governmental funding.