Andrej Romanovsky

Andrej A. Romanovsky, MD, PhD, is a physiologist and neuroscientist with primary expertise in body temperature regulation. In 2019, he left his Professor position at St. Joseph's Hospital (DBA Dignity Health, presently CommonSpirit Health) in Phoenix, Arizona, to work on the development of drugs for disorders of thermoregulation and hot flashes. Dr. Romanovsky helped to found the pharmaceutical startups Zharko Pharma, Catalina Pharma, and Synventa and currently works with these companies as an officer, Board member, or consultant. His primary affiliation is with Zharko Pharma in Olympia, Washington.

Andrej was born in St. Petersburg, Russia (at that time, USSR). After graduating from high school with a USSR National Scholastic Gold Medal, he entered the Pavlov First St. Petersburg State Medical University, where he received his MD with Distinction in 1984. Following Residency in Pathophysiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg (1984-1986), he joined the PhD program at the Institute of Physiology of the National Academy of Sciences in Minsk, Belarus. In 1989, he received a PhD in Physiology and, and at the age of 29 became the youngest Senior Scientist in the history of that institute. Following postdoctoral training in Neuroscience at the University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis (1991-1994), Dr. Romanovsky took the position of Associate Scientist and Director of the Thermoregulation Laboratory at the Legacy Health System in Portland, Oregon (1994-2000). In 1999, he became Professor at St. Joseph's Hospital, where for the next 20 years he directed FeverLab, his basic-research laboratory studying thermoregulation and systemic inflammation. In addition to the long-term affiliations mentioned above, Dr. Romanovsky worked for several months as a visiting scientist at the University of Pécs Medical School in Hungary and at the Kanazawa University Medical School in Japan. Prof. Romanovsky’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the State of Arizona, and a number of foundations and pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Romanovsky presented his research at numerous scientific conferences all over the world, including the Nobel Conference on Inflammatory Reflex in Stockholm, Sweden (2006).

Dr. Romanovsky has published more than 130 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, including top-tier journals such as Blood, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Journal of Neuroscience, Nature Neuroscience, Pharmacological Reviews, and PLoS Biology. He happened to be the senior author of the very first article published by the journal PLoS One. At the time of this writing, Dr. Romanovsky’s Hirsch index is 54 (Google Scholar). His most frequent co-authors (all Andrej’s former postdocs are now independent researchers and professors) are Drs. Alexandre A. Steiner, Andras Garami, M. Camila Almeida, Samuel P. Wanner, Andrei I. Ivanov, and Vladimir A. Kulchitsky, as well as Andrej’s mentor Prof. Miklós Székely. Dr. Romanovsky is the Editor of two volumes on Thermoregulation: From Basic Neuroscience to Clinical Neurology published by Elsevier within the Handbook of Clinical Neurology series in 2018. In 2013, Dr. Romanovsky started the journal Temperature with Landes Bioscience (now with Taylor & Francis) and has remained the Editor-in-Chief of this journal. Dr. Romanovsky has served as Associate Editor, Guest Editor, and Board member for 10 professional journals. He has served on study sections and reviewed grant applications for the National Institutes of Health (including the EUREKA panel), the National Science Foundation, the Medical Research Council (UK), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Dutch Research Council, the National Research Foundation (South Africa), the government of Hong Kong, and other agencies in many countries. Dr. Romanovsky served as a member of the Thermal Physiology Section of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (2004-2012).

Andrej’s hobby is tree farming. He has co-founded the family partnership Tree Fever: Forestland Conservation and Development and since 2011 has been operating a Douglas-fir tree farm growing timber in western Washington. Tree Fever Farm has been certified by the American Tree Farm System since 2012 and is an active participant in the Conservation and Stewardship Program and other programs run by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Andrej wrote two articles on tree farming, and his research on tree farming was supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture via a Western Sustainable Research and Education farmer grant.