Cynthia Gries completed medical school at University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.  In addition to completing her Internal Medicine residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital and her Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine fellowship at the University of Washington (UW), Dr. Gries received a Masters of Epidemiology from the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.  Dr. Gries joined the University of Washington faculty as a lung transplant sub-specialist in 2007 and subsequently joined the Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in 2010.

Dr. Gries’ clinical interests focus on caring for patients with advanced lung disease prior to and after lung transplantation.

Academic and Research Interests
Dr. Gries’s main area of research interest surrounds building a research program that focuses on improving long-term outcomes in lung transplant patients. She is interested in two main areas of research.

Her primary research focus concentrates on improving adherence after transplantation.  She has recently completed a longitudinal study that evaluated the burden of psychological disease and its effects on medical adherence. She is currently conducting a study that evaluates how patients and their caregivers understand medical information and how this affects their adherence and outcomes after transplantation.

Her other research interest focuses on improving long-term outcomes by improving lung allocation. She was awarded the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation Transplant Registry Junior Faculty Award to develop a predictive model of long-term survival among lung transplant recipients and used this model to assess the validity of the Lung Allocation Score.  In addition, she has studied the initial impact of the implementation of the Lung Allocation Score on waitlist and recipient characteristics. Finally, Dr. Gries is interested in the ethical and medical considerations of donation after circulatory death. She is currently co-chairing a joint collaboration of the American Thoracic Society, the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation, the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the United Network of Organ Sharing to develop a health policy statement regarding these issues.