Bryan F. Meyers, M.D., has been named the Patrick and Joy Williamson Endowed Chair in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the School of Medicine.
The endowed chair was made possible by a gift to the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation from Patrick and Joy Williamson and funds Meyers’ clinical research at WUSTL in perpetuity.
“Bryan is a spectacular example of the kind of leader we are blessed to have at Washington University,” said Timothy Eberlein, M.D., the Bixby Professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery, the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Distinguished Professor and director of the Siteman Cancer Center and surgeon-in-chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “He is a superb technical surgeon and has been a leader in developing new treatment paradigms in thoracic surgery. Even more important, he is one of the most compassionate and caring surgeons we have on our faculty. He has quickly developed into an international star who is uniformly respected by all of his colleagues.”
“The contribution Bryan Meyers makes to medicine is far-reaching,” said Richard J. Liekweg, president of Barnes-Jewish Hospital. “Patients travel from across the country and the world for care by lung specialists at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, one of the leading lung transplant programs in the nation — not just for our expertise but for the exceptional care provided by physicians like Dr. Meyers.”
The Williamsons gave the gift to honor Meyers and the lung transplant team for performing successful lung transplant surgery on Joy Williamson 12 years ago.
Meyers is professor of surgery and chief of the General Thoracic Surgery section of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery and a lung cancer specialist with the Siteman Cancer Center. His clinical activity includes work in thoracic oncology, lung transplantation and benign esophageal diseases including minimally invasive esophageal surgery. He conducts research in lung transplantation, lung reduction surgery and lung cancer surgery.
“The opportunity to become the first recipient of the Williamson Chair is a great honor to me,” Meyers said. “It’s heartening to know that the work I’ve chosen to do and the areas I’ve chosen to focus on have made a difference to people.”
Recently, Meyers conducted research that found that emphysema patients could benefit from lung reduction on one side only, which makes the life-saving operation available to more patients. He also is working to evaluate the use of radioactive implants combined with surgical removal of small sections of lung to treat stage I lung cancer. He is one of the investigators of a vaccine designed to prevent the recurrence of lung cancer, which now is being tested in centers around the world, including the Siteman Cancer Center.