ERS Gold Medal in COPD 2016

Professor François Maltais has been practicing pulmonology at the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute since 1992. He is Chief of the Respiratory Division and Director of Respiratory Research at the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute. He has also undertaken the role of Director of the Pulmonary Rehabilitation and Director of Respiratory Research at the same institution as well as being a clinician, scientist and professor at the Faculté de médecine de l'Université Laval.

His major research interests include the physiopathology of exercise intolerance in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pulmonary rehabilitation. His researches, which are supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Canada's premier funding agency for health research, also focus towards the understanding of the mechanism of limb muscle dysfunction in COPD.

In 2006, Professor Maltais won the Romain Pauwels Research Award presented by the European Respiratory Society to an investigator aged under 46 who had an important contribution to research in Respiratory Medicine. Since 2009, he has been recipient and director of the GlaxoSmithKline/CIHR Research Chair on COPD at Université Laval. Professor Maltais lists over 200 scientific publications and he regularly speaks at international conferences.