Current Professional Positions: Director of Research, Department of Emergency Medicine, Carolinas Medical Center

Residency: Carolinas Medical Center

Year Appointed to Board: 2005

Bio: Dr. Kline received his medical doctorate from the Medical College of Virginia in 1990. He completed residency training in emergency medicine at the Carolinas Medical Center in 1993 and then a research fellowship in 1994.

Dr. Kline's research fellowship and early research career focused on cardiac contractility and energy metabolism in shock states. This interest led Dr. Kline to focus on cardiopulmonary stress induced by severe pulmonary embolism. He developed and published a rat model of pulmonary embolism and subsequently began clinical studies using breath-based methods to diagnose and assess the severity of pulmonary embolism in humans. His research interest has expanded to include the development of breath-based devices to diagnose PE and computerized devices to predict pretest probability.

He has written 16 US patents for novel medical devices. To help translate these ideas into practice, he co-founded BreathQuant Medical Systems Inc, a privately held medical device company, currently supported by over $6.5MM in venture capital funding.

Over the past 7 years, he has published over 50 original manuscripts as first or senior author in the area of pulmonary embolism, and has trained 8 research fellows, all of whom hold faculty positions in emergency medicine.

In 2004, he was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors at SAEM. He is currently the PI on two NIH/NHLBI-sponsored grants, including an RO1 and R42; he is the mentor on two NIH-funded K23 grants to two former research fellows, and in 2005, received funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to serve as mentor for a Medical Student Research Fellowship.

He resides in Charlotte NC, with his wife Judy, and two young children, Hannah and Paul George.