Richard J. Castriotta, M.D., FCCP, FAASM is a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston McGovern Medical School (UTHealth). He has served as Professor of Internal Medicine, and Director of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at UTHealth as well as Chief of Pulmonary Medicine, Chairman of the Institutional Ethics Committee and Medical Director of the Sleep Disorders Center and Pulmonary Diagnostic Services at Memorial Hermann Hospital - Texas Medical Center in Houston. He has served as President of the Southern Sleep Society, Chair of the Connecticut Thoracic Society Section on Sleep Medicine, Chair of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) Sleep NetWork Steering Committee, Chair of the ACCP Palliative and End-of-Life Care NetWork, a member of the ACCP SEEK Editorial Board and Vice Chair of the Southern Medical Association Chest Disease Section. He is now President of the Southern Sleep Foundation Board of Directors. He is a Distinguished Educator and Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. His research interests involve REM sleep behavior disorder and Parkinson’s disease, sleep-related hypoventilation, complex sleep apnea and adaptive servo-ventilation, control of breathing in obesity, sleep architecture in agenesis of the corpus callosum and sleep-disordered breathing in heart and lung transplant patients, ventricular assist devices, and atrial fibrillation.
Dr. Castriotta is an internationally-recognized leader in pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine as a clinician, teacher and researcher. He has been a pioneer in the field of sleep medicine, establishing a sleep laboratory in 1981 and a formal sleep medicine fellowship program in 1999. He was the senior author on the papers establishing the safety and efficacy in using helium to treat acute severe asthma with consequent reduction in asthma mortality. He was instrumental in establishing the definitive diagnosis of sarcoidosis by imaging studies. He was the first author on the definitive study of sleep disorders after traumatic brain injury and he remains one of the world’s experts in this field.