Rate My Professor Timothy Billiar

Timothy R. Billiar, MD, serves as the George Vance Foster Professor and Chair of the Department of Surgery in the field of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, a position held since 1999. He is also Distinguished Professor of Surgery, Associate Senior Vice Chancellor for Clinical Academics at the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences, and Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at UPMC since 2021. Billiar holds additional leadership roles as Senior Scientific Advisor for UPMC Enterprises, UPMC International, and the UPMC Immune Transplant and Therapy Center; Vice-President and Chief Academic Officer of University of Pittsburgh Physicians; and Associate Medical Director of UPMC International and Commercial Services Division. He earned a BA in Natural Sciences from Doane College and an MD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine in 1983, followed by surgical residency training at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and Clinics and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, including a four-year research fellowship at the latter. Joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 1992 as a trauma surgeon, he has maintained a prolific research career focused on mechanisms of acute cellular and organ injury in inflammatory states such as shock, trauma, and sepsis; innate immune activation involving damage-associated molecular patterns and pattern recognition receptors; hepatocyte cell death pathways; and nitric oxide biology in the liver, including the initial cloning of the human inducible nitric oxide synthase gene.