Timothy Patrick Matthew Whelan, MD

Dr. Rissmiller grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Villanova University as an undergraduate. He then moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina and spent ten years at Wake Forest University completing medical school, a residency in internal medicine and a pulmonary and critical care fellowship. He then spent nine years in Charlotte, North Carolina, at Carolinas Medical Center (Main Campus) and provided pulmonary and critical care services for patients, as well as taking an active role in resident and medical student education. Dr. Rissmiller moved to MUSC in February of 2013 and has helped expand the sarcoidosis program, as well as seeing patients with pulmonary hypertension and general inpatient and outpatient pulmonary medicine. He maintains an interest in education. He has been designated a master clinical teacher by the medical school in 2014 and was awarded the Michael E. Assey Teaching Award for the Department of Internal Medicine in 2015.

Patrick Flume is a Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina. He serves as the Powers-Huggins Endowed Chair for Cystic Fibrosis and oversees a large Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Center, including the largest adult CF program in South Carolina. He also leads large clinical programs dedicated to patients with bronchiectasis and non-tuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) infections. He is recognized by the national and international CF community having served on the CF Foundation Center Committee, the Adult Care Consensus Committee, and the Advisory Task Force on Adult Issues, the Professional Education Committee, the European CF Society’s Best Practices committee, and as founding co-chair of the CF Foundation’s Pulmonary Practice Guidelines Committee. He co-led the International Working Group on Antimicrobial Resistance in Cystic Fibrosis. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Cystic Fibrosis. He serves as Associate Vice President for Clinical Research at MUSC, leads a very busy clinical research program for CF, bronchiectasis, and NTM, and is co-principal investigator for the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research Institute. Many of these studies are related to new drug and therapy development for patients, but he also has an interest in determining optimal management of CF pulmonary exacerbations and is the co-PI in the STOP trials, aimed at identifying optimal treatments for exacerbations.

Dr. W.A. (Jay) Brzezinski completed medical school in his home state of Nebraska at Creighton University and graduated AOA, the medical honor society. He then finished his residency training at Creighton and is board certified in internal medicine. He moved to South Carolina in 1987 and has been a faculty member at MUSC since. He is an associate professor of medicine and a fellow in the American College of Physicians. Dr. Brzezinski's interests in tropical medicine are an extension of his work for 10 years in the Dominican Republic in Latin America where he acted as medical director for an exchange program for medical students. He has a working knowledge of Spanish.Since coming to MUSC, he has concentrated his research efforts in primary care and treatment of hypertension. He has been principal investigator on numerous projects and continues his interest in these areas.Dr. Brzezinski has been an active teacher and has won numerous medical student and resident teaching awards. He has been nominated by the medical students for the Golden Apple teaching award frequently and has won the award five times. Most recently he was awarded the Michael Assey M.D. teaching award by the internal medicine residents as the best attending physician of the year. He also was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy teaching excellence award by the student board of governors as university teacher of the year at Creighton University.In addition to his teaching duties Dr. Brzezinski has an active patient practice at MUSC in primary care internal medicine.