Two long-time department chairs in the School of Medicine will step down in the coming months.

Department of Critical Care Medicine

Derek Angus will leave his role as chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine effective June 30, 2026. 

Angus has led the department since 2008 when he succeeded inaugural chair Mitchell Fink, who established the first stand-alone critical care medicine department in the United States in 2001. Under Angus’ stewardship, the department has grown to more than 275 faculty, advanced practice providers, staff and trainees. Numerous faculty and former fellows are ranked in the top five or top 10 globally as the most prolific and cited researchers in the field. In 2017, Angus also launched the UPMC ICU Service Center, which coordinates the provision of ICU services across the entire 30+ UPMC hospital system.

Angus is a world-renowned clinical, epidemiological and translational researcher of sepsis, pneumonia, multisystem organ failure, and optimal delivery of acute care and intensive care services. He is also an international leader in novel clinical trial design, developing and evaluating approaches to facilitate smarter decision making and faster learning in health care, and designed and steered a global adaptive platform trial during the COVID-19 epidemic that led to many insights on optimal treatment. Before joining the School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 1992, he completed medical school and internal medicine training at the University of Glasgow, as well as a fellowship in critical care medicine and masters of public health in health services administration at Pitt.

He will continue to serve as a distinguished professor of critical care medicine. A national search for his successor as chair will be launched by January.

Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology

Bruce Freeman has decided to step down as the chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology. A search has been launched for his successor, and Freeman has agreed to remain as chair until a new leader is appointed.

During his nearly 20 years as chair, the department has consistently been ranked as one of the best funded and most impactful in the United States and worldwide. Its mission has been to create an intellectual and physical environment in which basic chemical principles are applied to the understanding of cell signaling events, with these insights then translated to the creation of new therapeutic strategies. Supported by 40 staff members, many of the department’s 68 faculty, 31 postdocs and 77 masters and PhD trainees are appointed in multiple institutes within the School of Medicine.

After completing his PhD in biochemistry at University of California, Riverside, and post graduate training at Duke University Medical Center, Freeman joined Duke as a postdoctoral fellow and later as an assistant professor of medicine. He went on to serve as a tenured associate professor and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Departments of Anesthesiology, of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, and of Pediatrics before joining the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as professor and chair of pharmacology and chemical biology in 2006.

Freeman will continue at Pitt as a distinguished professor of pharmacology and chemical biology.