David Gozal

Dr. Gozal is currently the Marie M. and Harry L. Smith Endowed Chair and the Chairman of the Department of Child Health at the University of Missouri, as well as Physician-in-Chief of the University of Missouri Health Children’s Hospital. He received his M.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and MBA degrees from Georgetown University and ESADE, completed his pediatric residency at the Haifa Medical Center in Israel, and then spent 2 years in Cameroon, West Africa, developing rural healthcare networks, for which he received the title of “Knight of the Order of Merit”. He then completed his pediatric pulmonology and sleep medicine training at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles in 1993 and joined the faculty at the University of Southern California and UCLA. In 1994, he moved to Tulane University, and was appointed tenured Professor and Constance Kaufman Endowed Chair in Pediatric Pulmonology Research in 1997. From 1999 till 2009, Dr. Gozal was at the University of Louisville as the Children’s Hospital Foundation Chair for Pediatric Research, Distinguished University Scholar, Inaugural Director of the Kosair Children’s Research Institute, and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Medicine Fellowship Program, both of which were recognized as programs of distinction by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. From 2009, Dr. Gozal served as Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics and Physician-in-Chief and CEO of Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago, and then assumed the position of Herbert T. Abelson Professor at the University of Chicago, where he also held the title of Pritzker Scholar. Dr. Gozal’s research interests include projects such as gene and cellular regulation in hypoxia and sleep disruption, murine models of sleep disorders, and genomic and proteomic approaches to clinical and epidemiological aspects of sleep apnea in both adults and children. In addition, he has pioneered biomarker discovery and machine learning approaches for the diagnosis of sleep apnea across the lifespan. More recently, he has begun exploration of the role of the gut microbiome and circulating exosomes as mechanistic effectors and biomarkers in sleep disorders and associated morbidities.  
He is Past President of the American Thoracic Society where he was the third pediatrician to be elected to such high office, was a member of the Board of Directors of the Sleep Research Society 2014-2016, and Senior Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the journal Sleep, and Associate Editor for AJRCCM, ERJ, Pediatric Pulmonology, and Frontiers in Neurology and Frontiers in Psychiatry. He has been the recipient of the ATS Amberson Lecture in 2002 and was awarded the William C. Dement Academic Achievement Award by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine in 2013, and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Sleep Foundation. He has also received two honorary doctorates from the University of Barcelona and University of Lleida in Spain.  His research work has been continuously supported by grants from the NIH since 1992, has published over 825 peer-reviewed original articles carrying a H index of 133 and >75,000 citations (one of the top 1,000 most cited scientists and one of the top ranked investigators in Medicine in the world), along with more than 165 book chapters and reviews, edited 6 books including the reference textbook in pediatric sleep medicine, presented more than 1,000 scientific abstracts, and has extensively lectured all over the world.

Extensive leadership experience in academic settings as department chair of pediatrics in prestigious universities