Chief Welcome

The Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine at our institution has a long history of clinical achievement & traditional academia, lead by physician- scientists, skilled clinicians, and talented educators. Our mission is three- fold: Clinical care, Education & Scholarship.

We strive every day to ensure modern high quality clinical care in the outpatient & inpatient arenas.   

• Our outpatient practice includes sub- specialty clinics in: Interstitial Lung Disease (Dr. Alpa Desai, clinical director), Pulmonary Hypertension (Dr. Paul Strachan, clinical director), Asthma (Dr. Ewa Rakowski, clinical director), Sleep Medicine (Dr. Avram Gold, clinical director) & Lung Cancer (Dr. Mohsen Davoudi, Lung Cancer Evaluation Clinic).  We are also regional experts in pleural disease, post- ICU care & post- COVID care (Dr. Abigail Chua, Pulmonary liaison for post- COVID Clinic).  
• In our inpatient pulmonary consultative medicine service, we bring our collective experiences in traditional pulmonary medicine together with modern practices of bedside ultrasound (Dr. Lukman Hassan, Clinical Ultrasound Director) & procedural techniques (Dr. Asem Qadeer, Procedure Service Director) to provide comprehensive high quality consultative care. 
• In our Medical Intensive Care Unit (Dr. Sahar Ahmad, MICU Director) & Covid ICU which is an extension of MICU, we provide modern high- quality care, by a multidisciplinary, multi- professional collaborative team approach.   

Within the only university-based teaching hospital in all of Suffolk County, our division provides a safe & boundless learning environment for the three fellowship programs we support (fellowship website): Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine Fellowship, Critical Care Medicine Fellowship, Sleep Medicine Fellowship. Fellows graduate with strong clinical, procedural & research experiences and make us proud as they go on to achieve success in private practice & in academia. We provide education programs in Ultrasound, Simulation (Dr. Sahar Ahmad, Director of Ultrasound Education & Simulation), and Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine (Dr. Paul Richman, School of Medicine Course Director) for the Internal Medicine Residency & for the School of Medicine.  

We have numerous clinical, bench and translational scholarly activities ongoing in our division, many of which include close collaborations with our colleagues in other fields of medicine including Hospitalist Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Nephrology, Trauma Surgery & Public Health, amongst others. Our areas of research and scientific inquiry include:  Cardiac Arrest & Resuscitation (J Patel Lab), Bedside Pulmonary Ultrasound & Echocardiography (Ahmad Lab) & Aerosol Medicine Delivery & Mechanics (Smaldone Lab).   

In these ways, our division is fully invested in the care of our community outpatients & inpatients; is deeply ingrained at all levels of medical education; and is actively contributing to science & scholarship.   

We perform each of these efforts with great dedication & immense pride.  We have a long, prestigious history of achievements & we look forward to an even brighter future.  I welcome you to learn more about us & share in my fondness for this division.   

^{Sahar Ahmad, M.D.
Interim Chief
Director of Ultrasound & Critical Care Education
Associate Professor of Medicine
Director, Medical Intensive Care Unit
Program Director, Critical Care Fellowship}