Thomas J. Lawley, M.D.

Thomas J. Lawley, M.D. is Dean and William P. Timmie Professor of Dermatology at Emory University School of Medicine. He was appointed Dean in September 1996 having served the previous year in the Dean’s office as Interim Dean and Executive Associate Dean.

Dr. Lawley is an internationally known expert in autoimmune skin diseases. He is a graduate of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He attended SUNY/Buffalo School of Medicine where he graduated with honors. He trained in Dermatology at Yale, Buffalo and The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and spent the early years of his career as a clinical investigator. He was senior investigator at the NCI/NIH Dermatology Branch in 1988 when he left to become Chairman of the Department of Dermatology at Emory. Under his leadership, the faculty grew from three to eighteen and the department went from no NIH funding to become the third highest NIH-funded dermatology department in the nation. His research interests include the cell biology of endothelial cells and the regulation of cell adhesion molecules and inflammation. He has published over 150 original articles and chapters.

Dr. Lawley has served on many boards and committees, including NIH study section and NIAID Council. He is currently immediate past chair of the Board of Directors of the American Association of Medical Colleges - the association represents all 131 accredited U.S. and 17 accredited Canadian medical schools; nearly 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems; 68 Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; nearly 90 academic and professional societies, representing 128,000 faculty members; the nation’s 75,000 medical students; and 110,000 resident physicians. He is President of the Emory Medical Care Foundation, Emory’s physician practice plan at Grady Hospital and on the Board of Directors of the Emory Children’s Center. He is on the Boards of Directors of the Emory Clinic and Emory Healthcare and was co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Liaison Committee for Medical Education, the group that oversees the accreditation of all medical schools in the U.S. and Canada. He is also a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Clinical and Climatologic Association. He has received a number of honors and awards, including the Pfizer Award, the Hoechst Award, the Public Health Service Superior Service Award, and the Marion Sulzberger Award given by the American Academy of Dermatology as Professor of the Year in Dermatology in 1995. 

His accomplishments as Dean include increasing Emory School of Medicine NIH and other sponsored research funding by nearly five-fold to more than $386M per year, and guiding Emory to a top 20 ranking among U.S. Medical Schools. Under his leadership strategic plans for research, teaching, and service have been implemented. An aggressive construction program has been initiated - one that is unprecedented in Emory’s history adding more than 1,000,000 square feet of space.