- Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Department of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
- Chief, Division of Rheumatology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Peter Merkel is Chief of the Division of Rheumatology and Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine. He received his MD from Yale University School of Medicine, his MPH from Harvard University, completed internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Merkel is an internationally recognized expert in vasculitis and serves as Principal Investigator of the NIH-sponsored Vasculitis Clinical Research Consortium (VCRC) and the Vasculitis Patient-Powered Research Network (VPPRN) — two leading international research infrastructures for clinical investigation in vasculitis. His research focuses on novel therapy development, clinical trial design, outcome measure development, clinical and genetic epidemiology, and biomarker discovery, with more than 450 peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Merkel chairs the OMERACT Vasculitis Working Group and has built the largest patient-partnered vasculitis research network in the world. He is a senior leader of the Penn Colton Center for Autoimmunity and the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health, and is a central translational figure linking rare autoimmune disease cohorts, federal funders, advocacy communities, and industry.
