Steven E. Reis, MD

In this video, Dr. Reis discusses translating life’s lessons into high-impact research during his Provost’s Inaugural Lecture, celebrating his appointment as Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine. 

Steven E. Reis, MD, is vice chancellor for multidisciplinary innovations, health sciences, and Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine. He is the founding director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (Pitt CTSI), which supports innovative approaches to biomedical discovery and the translation of biomedical advances into clinical and public health practice to serve diverse communities. Pitt’s CTSI is part of a national consortium of research institutes funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was established in 2006 as one of the first 12 such institutes in the nation. Since then, CTSI has been awarded more than $320 million in NIH grants, underscoring the institute’s achievements and its goals to foster collaborative and innovative research that advances new medical therapies and technologies in clinical care while training clinical scientists and ensuring greater access to research and clinical trials for patients and the public.

In 2016, the University of Pittsburgh received a more than $60 million award from NIH to build the foundational partnerships and infrastructure needed to carry out the All of Us program of President Barack Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), which was announced during the president’s 2015 State of the Union address. CTSI is directing the Pitt PMI project, known as the All of Us Pennsylvania Research Study, which aims to recruit 150,000 individuals as part of the 1 million or more U.S. participants who will be assessed to better understand how individual differences in lifestyle, environment, and genetics affect disease treatment and prevention.

Dr. Reis came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1994 as an assistant professor of medicine and has since served in a variety of positions, including director of the Clinical Research Cardiovascular Institute and of the Office of Clinical Research. He was also founding director of the LHAS Women’s Heart Center. Dr. Reis specializes in cardiology; and his research interests include racial disparities in cardiovascular disease, midlife cardiovascular disease as a predictor of late life dementia, cardiovascular health and heart disease in women, microvascular angina, endothelial function, and cardiovascular risk. Dr. Reis, who has experience as a volunteer firefighter, has also conducted cardiovascular research on firefighters, a group prone to cardiovascular disease given firefighting’s combination of heat, exertion, and dehydration.

Dr. Reis is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation. He received his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a cardiovascular fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital.