Christine Kim Garcia, a pulmonologist, medical researcher, and academic administrator, has been appointed director of the Columbia Precision Medicine Initiative (CPMI), a University-wide effort to develop and implement more personalized medical treatments.
Garcia, whose own research focuses on the genetic underpinnings of lung diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis, has served as chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons since 2020. She also holds appointments at Columbia’s Institute for Genomic Medicine and its Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics.
CPMI, since its creation in 2014, has promoted collaboration between Columbia scientists and physicians to improve clinical care in nearly all areas of medicine, including oncology, cardiology, reproductive medicine, and neurology. This has led to the development of new genomic-screening and diagnostic techniques, which enable doctors to spot distinct aspects of a patient’s physiology and customize treatments accordingly.
In leading CPMI, Garcia succeeds the initiative’s founding director, the molecular biologist Tom Maniatis.
