A renowned physician and medical researcher, Pamela B. Davis, MD, PhD, became dean of the School of Medicine and senior vice president for medical affairs at Case Western Reserve University in 2007 after serving as interim dean during the previous year. She served in this position until stepping down in 2020 to serve as a Professor in the Center for Community Health Integration. She holds the Arline H. and Curtis F. Garvin Research Professorship. She previously served as a professor of pediatrics, physiology and biophysics and a professor of molecular biology and microbiology at the university, and as chief of the pediatric pulmonary division at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and as director of the Willard A. Bernbaum Cystic Fibrosis Research Center at Case Western Reserve University.
In 2014, Dean Davis, a prolific researcher whose prior work focuses largely on cystic fibrosis, was inducted into the Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine. She was also elected as the 2015 Chair of the Medical Sciences Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where she was elected a fellow`. In 2020 she was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors. She has received the Smith College Medal, the Paul Di Sant’Agnese award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (their top prize for research), and the Frank and Dorothy Humel Hovorka Prize, the highest award for faculty at the University, among other honors. For more than 30 years, Dean Davis has been continuously funded by the NIH, including serving as the founding principal investigator of the school’s $64.6 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program from 2007 until 2015, when she began serving as the program’s associate principal investigator. In 2021 her research focus shifted to using informatics approaches in large databases to gain insight into important clinical problems, most recently the reciprocal interaction of COVID and several chronic conditions, and she is supported by the NIH for this work in the Multiple Principal Investigator mode.
Dean Davis holds seven U.S. patents and is a founding scientist of Copernicus Therapeutics Inc., a biotechnology company that creates novel pharmaceutical targeting and delivery systems. She has published more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has served in prominent roles such as the Advisory Council to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the Advisory Council for National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. She received her BS in chemistry, summa cum laude, from Smith College in 1968, and the doctorate in physiology and pharmacology in 1973 and her medical degree in 1974, both from Duke University.