Elizabeth Christine Oelsner, MD, MPH

Elizabeth Oelsner is a general internist, respiratory epidemiologist, and Herbert Irving Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC).

Dr Oelsner was graduated from Harvard College and worked as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company prior to earning her M.D. from the Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at CUIMC, followed by a fellowship in General Medicine that included a Masters in Public Health from the Mailman School. She joined the CUIMC faculty in 2014 and was named an Irving Scholar in 2018.

Dr Oelsner’s research leverages multi-disciplinary approaches and collaborative studies to identify and understand risk factors for chronic lung diseases. She is currently leading studies that apply quantitative lung imaging to assess the pulmonary parenchymal and microvascular effects of emerging respiratory risk factors including COVID-19 (The COVID-19 Lung-MaPS Study, NHLBI R01-HL157634) and non-cigarette tobacco products (The VapeScan Study, NHLBI R01-HL155576).

She leads the NHLBI Pooled Cohorts Study, which has harmonized extensive cardiopulmonary phenotypic data, including lung function and respiratory events, in order to perform large-scale epidemiologic analyses relating to chronic lung diseases, cigarette and non-cigarette tobacco use (R21HL153700), and cardiovascular disease. Results from the NHLBI Pooled Cohorts Study have been published in JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, and the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Dr Oelsner is also the Principal Investigator for the Collaborative Cohort of Cohorts for COVID-19 Research (C4R, NHLBI OT2HL156812), which is ascertaining cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 illness and events, and sequelae, across fourteen NHLBI and NINDS funded studies. These studies are distinguished by the racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and regional diversity of their participants, as well as their long-term follow up with deep and broad pre-pandemic phenotyping that includes imaging, multi-omics, and social determinants of health. C4R thereby aims to provide a collaborative resource to define risk and resilience factors for COVID-19 illness and its long-term sequelae (including by participation in RECOVER, OT2HL162011), as well as to study the impact of the pandemic on trajectories of health and disease.