Dr. Neal J. Thomas, professor, pediatrics and public health sciences, was recently appointed as chair of the 20-member Conflict of Interest Review Committee at Penn State Hershey. The panel is responsible for reviewing and managing financial conflict of interest of employees on the Hershey campus. Thomas joined the faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine with a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2005 and professor of pediatrics in 2011.
Thomas began his work with the Conflict of Interest Review Committee in 2007, coordinating most of the individual faculty reviews over the last eight years and seeing the work and responsibility of the committee grow, with increasing complexity of the federal conflict of interest regulations and the introduction of the electronic conflict of interest system. Thomas’ new position is closely related to his service on the Penn State Hershey Institutional Review Board since 2002 and on its executive committee in 2011. He is in an excellent position to establish the College of Medicine as an innovator and a leader in the national conflict of interest community and to make a real contribution nationwide.
Thomas has been recognized as an established investigator and is a recipient of more than 30 grants as principal investigator, from the NIH as well as private foundations and industry. He has been a member of more than 14 NIH study sections and review groups, on the editorial boards of four major journals and is one of the founding members of the Pediatric Acute Lung Injury and Sepsis Investigators Network. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and is one of four editors of a textbook in pediatric critical care medicine. His academic awards include six Presidential Citation Awards from the Society of Critical Care Medicine, multiple years of being named among the Best Doctors in America and receipt of the Hinkle Society Mid-Career Translational Research Award.