New Chair Named for UC San Diego Department of Medicine

Wolfgang H. Dillmann, MD, has been selected as chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. He has also been named the Helen M. Ranney Endowed Chair, the school’s first faculty-funded endowed chair, founded in 1991 in honor of the department’s second chair.

With nearly 470 full-time faculty members and more than 100 academic researchers, the Department of Medicine is one of the inaugural departments in the UCSD School of Medicine and the largest. Nationally recognized for research, teaching and clinical care in internal medicine in specialties ranging from arthritis and respiratory disease to hypertension and cancer, its internal medicine specialty training programs include 108 resident physicians, 83 ACGME fellows, and 131 postdoctoral research fellows. The department is also engaged in nearly 380 different biomedical research programs with funding awards totaling $113.6 million in fiscal year 2011.

Dillmann came to UC San Diego in 1979 as an assistant professor, moving up to associate and then full professor by 1987. He served as chief of the Endocrinology and Metabolism Division from 2005 to 2010, and as interim chair of the Department of Medicine since 2010. He is the fifth chair in the Department’s 43-year history.

He received his bachelor’s degree from Gymnasium, Aschaffenburg in Germany and his MD degree in medicine from the University of Munich. He completed his internship at Mt. Sinai Hospital, followed by residencies in medicine and endocrinology, both at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, the academic medical center associated with Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He began his career as an assistant professor there, and then served as an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota for two years before coming to San Diego.

His research interests in the laboratory include thyroid hormone action in the heart, as well as studies related to diabetic cardiomyopathy and the effects of excessive enzymatic protein glycosylation in cardiac myocytes and their influence on heart function. Dillmann’s lab also conducts studies related to the expression of specific heat shock proteins and protection of the heart against cardiac ischemia.

Dillmann is a member of the Association of American Physicians, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In the field of endocrinology and metabolism he is a member of the Endocrine Society, the American Thyroid Association, the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association and the International Society for Heart Research. He is past associate editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, past editorial board member of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and served as a member of the Cardiac Hypertrophy and Heart Failure NIH Study Section.