Paul E. Pepe

Eagles Global Coordinator

Paul E. Pepe is a life-long academician and public servant who has pioneered many multi-disciplinary advances in critical care and emergency medicine over the past four decades and who remains a highly-prolific and globally-respected leader in the realms of resuscitation research, EMS, disaster response and event medicine. Currently, Dr Pepe is the creator, program director and perennial moderator for the world-renowned EMS State of the Science: Gathering of Eagles conferences and, in turn, he serves as the global coordinator for the affiliated metropolitan EMS medical directors alliance as discussed below. Prior to his current public safety roles, he also spent many years as an academic and administrative chair for medical school-affiliated Emergency Medicine (EM) programs at both the Medical College of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern) at Dallas. While in these positions, he had overall financial and programmatic oversight of the affiliated EM residency and fellowship programs (e.g., toxicology, EMS, ultrasound, disaster and event medicine) and their associated faculty members and Division Chiefs. He not only helped to develop and steward the formal approval of two highly-successful EMS residency programs (Dallas and Austin), but he founded one of the original EMS fellowships in the 1980s. He has also since mentored dozens of EMS fellows and associate EMS medical directors who have gone on to be quite successful in their own right. In that respect, he has worked as a medical school faculty member for the past four decades and he has held tenured status for the past 30 years. He most recently retired from the UT Southwestern School of Medicine in Dallas where he had spent the past two decades as a tenured Professor of Internal Medicine, Surgery, Pediatrics, Emergency Medicine, Public Health and also as the Riggs Family Chair in Emergency Medicine (EM). In conjunction with his academic and administrative duties, he also provided supervising attending physician services at the Parkland Hospital Emergency-Trauma Center for Dallas County, where, for many years, he also had oversight of the other faculty members and resident staff caring daily for hundreds of acutely ill and injured. Dr. Pepe was not only the first nationally-elected President of NAEMSP, but he has since founded numerous premier educational offerings that have now trained thousands of newly-appointed and future EMS medical directors. Recognizing the breadth and scope of special event and protective medicine activities, he later helped to coin the term, Event Medicine (EVM), and he has since championed an academic model for EVM (specialized research and formal training) and those healthcare providers participating in crowd medicine and mass gathering medical care as well as other high-risk/high-profile events. He has since teamed-up with other world leaders in the realm of global entertainment medicine. His long-term vision is to create formal fellowship programs and eventual establishment of EVM as a recognized specialty in the House of Medicine, just as he did for the discipline of EMS. Today, as the longstanding coordinator of the Metropolitan EMS (9-1-1 system) Medical Directors global alliance, he actively leads a de facto physician coalition consisting of the medical final decision-makers for medical preparedness, training and patient care protocols for the 50 or so largest U.S. cities, their European metropolitan counterparts (e.g., London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Amsterdam, etc.). and those of several other nations worldwide as well as the medical directors from key federal agencies. With this alliance, he has not only helped to establish local contacts and medical advance plans for major events and other special operations, but, most importantly, he has facilitated real-time communications and more rapid changes in best practices for stroke, cardiac and trauma resuscitation worldwide as well as just-in-time directives and training for national crises (such as the U.S. Ebola and post-Katrina landfall events). Simultaneously, he has fostered the development of civilian tactical medical response and even imbedded S.W.A.T. doctors being incorporated in law enforcement tactical response and the development of toxicological, environmental and travel medicine expertise for mass gathering care providers. Dr. Pepe has held key leadership support roles in major U.S. disasters including hurricane Katrina, the Dallas police ambush shootings and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school tragedy in Parkland, Florida, for which he had been serving as medical director for special operations for both the Broward Sheriff’s Office (S.W.A.T.) and the Coral Springs/Parkland Fire Rescue Department (EMS) components. He has recently helped the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services develop a now-published update (“Mass Casualty Trauma Triage: Paradigms and Pitfalls”) regarding recommended triage strategies for mass casualty and active assailant events. Beyond his out-of-hospital emergency care and disaster medicine activities, he is an extremely distinguished academician with over 400 full-length published scientific papers, including many landmark publications such as the original “Chain of Survival” treatise, the first description and measurement of Auto-PEEP, permissive hypotension in trauma, re-appraisal of mouth-to-mouth breathing for bystander CPR, the Chicago airport AED study, on-scene management of pediatric cardiac arrest and the first clinical translation of “heads-up CPR”. Over the past several years, his vanguard research efforts in Florida have helped to introduce ground-breaking research that has helped to immediately double survival chances for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (e.g., in Palm Beach County) and also helped to establish one of the highest reported survival rates for children with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (e.g., in Polk County) and now has helped with a vanguard project to bring whole blood to the field for trauma patients in critical life-threatening conditions. In he has since presented over two-dozen scientific papers in which he reported these advances (and other successes based in Florida communities) at major national and international conferences. In addition, he continues to be one of the most sought-after speakers on EMS and out-of-hospital critical care worldwide. Exemplary awards and honors have come from a spectrum of professional societies including the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (Excellence in Research), the Society for Critical Care Medicine and the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. Designated as a Master of both the American College of Critical Care Medicine and the American College of Physicians (MCCM, MACP), he continues to lead many inter-disciplinary scientific panels for stroke, cardiac arrest, neuroprotection and EMS systems and he has established a tight-knit global coalition of major city EMS medical directors. Several years ago, when receiving an award for lifetime achievements from the American College of Emergency Physicians, presented in Washington, D.C. by then U.S. Surgeon General, Richard Carmona, Dr. Pepe was cited as the most accomplished emergency medical services physician of our generation.