Mark T. Gladwin

Mark T. Gladwin is an American physician-scientist and academic administrator serving as the dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine since 2022. He is also the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and vice president for medical affairs of the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Education and career
Gladwin earned a B.S. and M.D. (1991) from the University of Miami. He completed an internal medicine internship and residency in 1994 and served as chief resident in 1995 at the Oregon Health & Science University. He was a critical care fellow at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in 1996. In 1998, he completed a fellowship in pulmonary critical care at the University of Washington. He returned to the NIH Clinical Center as a senior research fellow in critical care medicine until 2000, also serving as the Chief of the Pulmonary and Vascular Medicine Branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Gladwin joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 2008 as a professor and the inaugural director of the University’s Vascular Medicine Institute. In 2015, he was appointed chair of the department of medicine. By the time Gladwin left the university in 2022, the department employed more than 1,000 faculty and had combined clinical and research revenues of almost $600 million.

On August 1, 2022, Gladwin was appointed dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, succeeding longtime dean E. Albert Reece. He oversees 46 academic departments with a total annual operating budget of $1.3 billion and more than 7,000 faculty, trainees, students and staff.

Gladwin is co-author of two medical textbooks in the "Made Ridiculously Simple" series from publisher Medmaster Inc. He wrote Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple with physicians William Trattler and C. Scott Mahan, and Critical Care and Hospitalist Medicine Made Ridiculously Simple with physician Michael Donahoe.

Research
Gladwin is a vascular, heart, and lung physician-scientist who has specialized in the study of reactive nitrogen molecules, like nitric oxide and nitrite, and how they regulate blood flow via reactions with hemoglobin. Researchers in the late 1970s discovered that nitric oxide (NO) regulated blood flow by triggering vasodilation, the widening of blood vessels. However, scientists considered metabolites of NO, such as nitrite (NO2), to be inert. But in 2003, Gladwin and a team of researchers published a paper in Nature Medicine demonstrating that nitrite could also trigger vasodilation, through conversion to NO, under low oxygen conditions in the body such as during a heart attack or stroke. Subsequent studies by other researchers suggest nitrite administered before or immediately following a heart attack could help preserve heart tissue.

Gladwin has also conducted research on hemoglobin-related proteins, such as neuroglobin, and their possible application as antidotes to carbon monoxide poisoning. He currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Globin Solutions, Inc., a pre-clinical stage biopharmaceutical company researching rapidly acting antidotes for carbon monoxide poisoning, including a modified form of neuroglobin. In December 2023, Gladwin and his team of researchers published a study in Nature Communications on the discovery of the first-ever link between hemoglobin-like protein and normal cardiac development.

Gladwin's work on blood flow and hemoglobin also led to discoveries related to sickle cell disease. In 2004, Gladwin and his colleagues found that 10% of sickle cell patients also exhibited pulmonary hypertension, high blood pressure in the blood vessels that supply the lung, and determined that hypertension was a major cause of death among sickle cell patients. They described this new human disease syndrome, called hemolysis-associated pulmonary hypertension, in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In June 2020, Gladwin initiated a 22-site Phase II clinical trial in France, Brazil, and the U.S. that is exploring whether blood transfusions that use the patient's own blood can improve outcomes and extend survival in patients with sickle cell disease.

Personal life
Dr. Gladwin was born in Palo Alto, California, and was raised in various locations in the U.S. as well as in remote locations in Ghana, Guatemala, and Mexico. His parents, Hugh Gladwin, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology at Florida International University, and Christina Gladwin, Ph.D., a professor of food and resource economics at the University of Florida, studied in these locations.

He is married to Dr. Tammy Shields, an epidemiologist and scientific investigator who has published research on cancer epidemiology and prevention. They have three children. Dr. Gladwin is an avid soccer and fitness enthusiast, currently playing competitive soccer in an over-40 outdoor premier league.