Dr. Serpil Erzurum

Patient-Centered Research at the Cleveland Clinic

Dr. Serpil Erzurum, ’79 BS

She runs one of the largest research centers in the country with a $250 million annual budget – but Dr. Serpil Erzurum is most content when she’s caring for a patient or immersed in research.

“That’s why my lab is right outside my office door,” she said. “I’m leading research, so I have to be surrounded by research.”

A 1979 YSU grad, Dr. Erzurum is chair of the Lerner Research Institute, the research arm of the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. The Clinic Board of Governors named her to the top job last summer after a yearlong national search.

As a practicing pulmonary physician, Dr. Erzurum is a prolific researcher in her own right – principal investigator for $60 million in federal research grants, she’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles. Always, her research has been focused on solving patient problems.

The Lerner Institute’s research philosophy coincides with Dr. Erzurum’s patient-centered views.

“We do all kinds of research here – heart, lung, brain, cancer, inflammation, metabolism – but never just for the sake of research,” she said. “Everything we do is aimed towards finding a solution to a human problem.”

She’s excited about a new team initiative, called Research Centers of Excellence, designed to accelerate the research process. Recent discoveries by the clinic’s Prostate Cancer Center of Excellence, for example, are now being tested in a clinical trial. “Research is such a long, slow process. We’re looking for ways to move our discoveries forward, from the lab to the patients we’re working to help,” she said.

Dr. Erzurum’s parents emigrated from Turkey in the 1950s and settled in Northeast Ohio, where they raised her and her four siblings. She liked school, graduated as a valedictorian of her 1977 Boardman High School class, but was uncertain about a major until a guidance counselor told her about the new, BS/MD program at YSU.

Within two years she had earned a bachelor’s degree from YSU under the accelerated program. “YSU was an invigorating experience for me. I loved it,” she said. “There was a strong sense of community there, and the professors were top notch.”

In 1983 she earned her medical degree, one of the first to graduate from what is now the Northeast Ohio Medical University. She went on to complete an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, a fellowship in Pulmonary Critical Care at the University of Colorado and postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md.

She joined the Cleveland Clinic in 1993, where she is founding chair of its Department of Pathobiology, a professor at the Lerner College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Respiratory Institute. “I work an 80-hour week,” she admitted, “but I love what I do. The people I work with and my patients, I consider them family.”

One sister and two brothers also pursued careers in medicine. Dr. Sergul Erzurum is an ophthalmologist in Youngstown; Dr. Serhat Erzurum is an obstetrician and gynecologist in Boardman; and Dr. Zafer Erzurum, deceased, was a vascular surgeon. Sergul and Zafer also earned degrees from YSU and NEOMED; another sister, Sevil, has a successful career in real estate.

One of her two adult children is also attending medical school; the other is in law school. Her husband, and their father, is deceased.

Dr. Erzurum credits her parents for her success and that of her siblings. Her father was an engineer and encouraged her love for mathematics; she calls her mother a “self-educated, classy lady” who loves learning, even though she had only an eighth grade education in Turkey.

“Both of my grandmothers, just two generations before me, could not read or write,” she recalled. “My mother always told all us girls, not just the boys, that we would finish high school and college. She had a tremendous impact on us. When I started at YSU, it was a dream for her.”