Dr. Oelsner is a general internist, respiratory epidemiologist, and Associate Professor at Columbia University Medical Center. Her focus is on identifying risk factors for chronic lung diseases to promote primary prevention and novel therapeutic strategies.

Dr. Oelsner’s research in observational cohorts has leveraged imaging and clinical outcomes to define COPD and its sub-phenotypes and to explore relevant mechanisms. She established that the extent of emphysema-like lung on CT is associated with dyspnea, incident COPD, all-cause mortality and respiratory-specific mortality. She established that former cigarette smoking was associated with accelerated lung function decline, revising the longstanding Fletcher/Peto paradigm. She is studying the potential pulmonary toxicity of e-cigarettes by applying lung CT and cardiopulmonary MRI in healthy young adults. She has investigated the prognostic significance of contested definitions of COPD and PRISm, with findings that are cited in current COPD guidelines.

Dr. Oelsner is also a nationally recognized leader in collaborative meta-cohort studies as PI of the NHLBI Pooled Cohorts Study (PCS) and the Collaborative Cohort of Cohorts for COVID-19 Research (C4R). For the PCS, she harmonized decades of spirometry and respiratory symptom data, as well as defining COPD-related clinical outcomes. These harmonized data have been used for over 40 publications in high impact journals and are supporting large-scale genomic analyses in the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine Project. For C4R, Dr. Oelsner conducted standardized ascertainment of SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 illness, COVID-19 sequelae and pandemic period effects in >52,000 participants from 14 historically independent cohorts. C4R expanded the PCS harmonization to additional cohorts and phenotypes, including artificial intelligence-based harmonization of chest CT measures. Furthermore, C4R made innovations that are in use or under consideration by other consortia, including central coordination; remote biosample collection via dried blood spot; and use of a cloud-based platform for data harmonization and analysis.