Physician-Scientist Livia Veress Takes Dual Leadership Role in Pediatric Medicine at Mount Sinai

Mount Sinai Health System has appointed Livia Agnes Veress, MD, as Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics and System Chief of Pediatric Pulmonology, effective September 1. In addition to these leadership positions, she will serve as a Professor of Pediatrics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and as an attending physician at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital. The dual appointment places one physician-scientist at the intersection of two of the most demanding mandates in academic pediatrics: building a research enterprise capable of translating laboratory discoveries into therapies for children, and overseeing clinical pulmonology services across a health system that spans seven hospitals and hundreds of outpatient practices.

Dr. Veress arrives at Mount Sinai with an unusually broad clinical portfolio. She is board certified in pediatric pulmonology and holds additional training in pediatric critical care medicine, a combination that equips her to manage children whose respiratory failure requires both intensive care support and long-term pulmonary follow-up. Her stated areas of clinical expertise include some of the most complex and least commonly treated airway and lung diseases in pediatric medicine, among them acute respiratory distress syndrome, plastic bronchitis, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, bronchiolitis obliterans, chemical inhalation injuries, and interstitial lung disease. Each of these conditions presents distinct diagnostic and therapeutic challenges, and several lack approved, disease-specific treatments, which helps explain why her career has moved so deliberately between the bedside and the drug development laboratory.

In her role as Vice Chair for Research, Dr. Veress will lead the research strategy and infrastructure of the Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics. Her mandate includes close coordination with the department chair, the Grants Administration Office, and the Pediatric Clinical Trials Office, as well as with research-focused institutes across Mount Sinai, including The Mindich Child Health and Development Institute. The position is effectively an integrative one: rather than running a single laboratory, she is charged with aligning the department’s investigators, funding administration, and clinical trial capacity so that ideas generated in basic science or clinical observation can progress efficiently toward studies in children. In an announcement describing her priorities, she emphasized the depth of child health expertise and infrastructure already present at Mount Sinai and her intention to bring those strengths together in new ways, creating an environment where innovative ideas can move from the laboratory and clinical setting toward treatments that make a meaningful difference for children and their families. She also highlighted her enthusiasm for supporting the next generation of physician-scientists and for building collaborations across disciplines.

Her second role, as System Chief of Pediatric Pulmonology, extends her oversight across the entire Mount Sinai Health System rather than a single hospital. She will direct the division’s clinical, research, and academic strategy, while maintaining an active clinical practice at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, where she will care for children with complex respiratory conditions. The health system has emphasized that her practice will draw on her specialized expertise in pediatric airway and lung disease, acute respiratory distress syndrome, plastic bronchitis, and toxic inhalation injuries. Maintaining an active clinical panel while holding system-level administrative and research responsibilities is demanding, but it reflects a model of physician leadership in which the person setting strategy continues to see the patients that strategy is meant to serve.

Leadership at Mount Sinai framed the appointment as a strategic fit for the department’s ambitions. Lisa M. Satlin, MD, the Herbert H. Lehman Professor and Chair of the Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics and Pediatrician-in-Chief of Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, said that Dr. Veress brings together the combination of clinical expertise, scientific leadership, and vision needed to advance the Department of Pediatrics. According to Dr. Satlin, her leadership will strengthen the research enterprise while helping to expand and enhance care for children with complex pulmonary conditions, and the department looks forward to the discoveries and opportunities her leadership will bring to faculty, trainees, patients, and families. The statement underscores a recurring theme in academic medicine: departments increasingly seek leaders who can simultaneously manage the scientific enterprise and the clinical service lines that depend on it, rather than treating research and patient care as separate administrative tracks.

Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Veress was a Tenured Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Advanced Drug Development at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Children’s Hospital of Colorado. That background is notable because it combines senior academic standing with direct experience in drug development, a discipline that requires navigating preclinical testing, regulatory frameworks, and the practical logistics of moving an investigational compound toward human trials. Her training path began with a medical degree from LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, followed by a pediatric residency at LSU. She then completed fellowship training in both pediatric critical care medicine and pediatric pulmonology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, giving her formal credentials in the two specialties that most closely define her clinical work today.

Her research program is unusually wide-ranging, but its unifying thread is lung injury and repair. She works on the prevention of bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a chronic lung disease that can develop in infants born extremely prematurely and that is often linked to the very therapies, including mechanical ventilation and oxygen, used to keep them alive. Related work addresses physiology-based treatment modalities, mechanical ventilation strategies, ventilator-induced lung injury, and acute lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome more broadly. She is also involved in the development of lung ultrasound as an imaging modality, an area of growing interest because it offers bedside assessment of the lung without radiation exposure, a meaningful consideration in pediatric patients who may require repeated monitoring over long hospitalizations.

Another major strand of her research concerns lung development disorders arising from in utero drug and chemical exposures, along with pulmonary drug toxicities, coagulation abnormalities, endothelial injuries, and pulmonary hypertension. She also studies lung injury associated with opioid overdose, a topic of increasing clinical relevance as overdose-related respiratory complications continue to burden intensive care units. Her work on inhalation injuries, plastic bronchitis, and lung fibrotic disorders connects directly to her clinical practice, and she is investigating novel fibrinolytic and antifibrotic drug therapies for conditions including plastic bronchitis and chemical inhalation toxicities. Plastic bronchitis, in which abnormal casts form in the airways and can obstruct breathing, is a striking example of a rare condition where fibrinolytic approaches, designed to dissolve the protein-based casts, represent a rational therapeutic strategy informed by the underlying biology of airway injury and clotting dysregulation.

The funding profile behind this work reflects both its scientific merit and its public health relevance. Her research has been supported by multiple National Institutes of Health grants, including R01 awards, the classic mechanism for investigator-initiated research, and CounterACT U-series awards, which fund research aimed at medical countermeasures against chemical threats. She has also held contracts from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These funding streams are designed to support U.S. Food and Drug Administration drug development programs and to improve civilian rescue operations and disaster response after chemical inhalation events. In practical terms, this means her laboratory work on inhaled toxicants is tied to national preparedness efforts, translating basic understanding of chemical lung injury into therapies and protocols that could be deployed in the aftermath of industrial accidents or other mass-casualty inhalation exposures.

For Mount Sinai, the appointment arrives at a moment when the institution continues to invest in child health research and in the integration of clinical care with scientific discovery. The health system, which comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses across its hospitals, outpatient practices, and more than 600 research and clinical laboratories, has positioned pediatrics as a field where translational momentum can be built. Dr. Veress’s combination of critical care training, rare-disease expertise, drug development experience, and federal research funding makes her a fitting choice for a role that asks a single leader to knit together clinical service, investigator support, and the pipeline from bench to bedside. For the children with complex pulmonary conditions who will pass through Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital, the hope embedded in this appointment is straightforward: that the diseases she has spent her career studying, from bronchopulmonary dysplasia in premature infants to plastic bronchitis and inhalation injuries in older children, will increasingly be met with treatments that did not exist when her research began.

Subject of Research: Leadership appointment in pediatric pulmonology and pediatric lung injury research

Article Title: Mount Sinai appoints Livia Agnes Veress, MD, as Vice Chair for Research in Pediatrics and System Chief of Pediatric Pulmonology

Article References: Mount Sinai appoints Livia Agnes Veress, MD, as Vice Chair for Research in Pediatrics and System Chief of Pediatric Pulmonology. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Mount Sinai, pediatric pulmonology, Livia Veress, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, plastic bronchitis, inhalation injuries, mechanical ventilation, fibrinolytic therapy, CounterACT, NIH funding, translational research