Jonathan Siner, MD

Jonathan Siner, MD, is the clinical section chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, and specializes in quality and safety work and treating interstitial lung disease(ILD), or diseases that cause lung scarring.

“I’m mechanically inclined, and being a physician working in ILD and in critical care, what I like is that there is a lot of problem-solving and sorting things out,” Dr. Siner says. “A lot of medicine is procedural, but ILD doesn’t have a lot of great diagnostics. You have to really interview your patient. Critical care physicians are like the generalists for sick patients. Yes, we manage the lungs, but we are also working with all the other specialists on complex issues and it’s very integrative.”

He was formerly the director of the Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU), where he led a hospital-wide initiative to prevent central line-associated blood stream infections. Thanks to the work of Dr. Siner and his team, YNHH reported a 50% reduction in the number of such infections between 2009 and 2013. In 2019, Dr. Siner received Yale Medicine’s Excellence in Quality and Safety Award.

“The core work of an MICU director is in quality and safety, and a lot of times that involves problem-solving in the practical sense and also taking a new vantage point and recognizing that there is a different way of doing things,” Dr. Siner says.

Dr. Siner’s research interests include low-tidal volume ventilation for ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) and swallowing dysfunction after mechanical ventilation.