Ron Poropatich

Ron Poropatich, MD 

Dr. Ronald Poropatich is the Director of the Center for Military Medicine Research (CMMR), Health Sciences and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Poropatich is also Professor of Sports Medicine & Nutrition in the Department of Sports Medicine and Nutrition, University of Pittsburgh, School of Health and Rehabilitation Science and an affiliated faculty member of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. The Pitt CMMR has been instrumental in building collaborative multi-disciplinary and multi-organizational research teams with Pitt and DoD Faculty to improve the health and well-being of service members, veterans and their families that has led to significant DoD medical research funding for the University of Pittsburgh. 

Dr. Poropatich is an experienced Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine physician who served 30 years on active duty in the US Army retiring in 2012 at the rank of Colonel with extended assignments at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, MD from 1985 to 2012 and at the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, MD, where he managed large medical research programs and developed novel research programs and technologies in medical informatics and telemedicine. 

Dr. Poropatich received his medical degree from Drexel University in 1985. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 1988 and was selected as Chief of Medical Residents in the WRAMC Department of Medicine from 1988-1989. He completed his fellowships in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in 1992 also at the WRAMC. As a Pulmonary/Critical Care medicine physician, Dr. Poropatich’ s early research interests were in sarcoidosis and the general field of bronchoscopy. 

Colonel/Retired Poropatich led the U.S. Army effort from 1992-2012 in the development and deployment of telemedicine capability across twenty-two time zones for remote consultation for both overseas locations (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kuwait, Haiti, Croatia) as well as stateside U.S. Army locations. He served as the U.S. Army Medical Informatics Consultant from 2000-2008. Since 1996, he has served as an Associate Editor for the “Telemedicine and e-Health Journal,” is the former Chair of the NATO Telemedicine Expert Team (2000-2012), and former President (2002-2003) and Board Member of the American Telemedicine Association since 1995. 

Dr. Poropatich’s research interests are in the fields of pre-hospital medical autonomous care on the battlefield using clinical decision support tools informed by machine learning as well as autonomous medical evacuation using both air and ground unmanned vehicles. He is funded on numerous DoD grants to include SBIR and DARPA contracts and also works with numerous civilian organizations to apply medical autonomous care to rural civilian settings. 

He is a long-standing educator and has been faculty at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Science (USUHS), Bethesda, MD, since 1985 and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Medicine. He has over eighty publications in peer-reviewed medical journals, numerous book chapters, and edited two books on Telemedicine. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine in Medicine, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians, Fellow and past president of the American Telemedicine Association, and Fellow, American Institute for Medical Biological Engineering.