Core Faculty

All section faculty participate in clinical, research, and teaching efforts with fellows. Our core program faculty dedicate additional time and effort to help ensure ongoing program excellence. These faculty members work most closely with fellows, and serve as conference sponsors, clinical competency committee members, fellow advisors, clinic preceptors, and more. You may click any faculty member’s profile to learn more about their areas of focus. Below we’ve highlighted a few faculty members’ activities and their involvement with our fellows.

Matthew Charles Miles, MD, MEd

Program Director

Matthew C. Miles, MD is an Associate Professor of Medicine in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and has been fellowship program director since 2016. He completed residency and fellowship at Wake Forest, and earned a Master’s in Medical Education and Curriculum Development from the University of Cincinnati. He maintains an active clinical practice in general pulmonology and critical care medicine and is a regular preceptor for fellow continuity clinics.

Dr. Miles has served in several leadership positions with the American College of Chest Physicians and is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief for the open access journal CHEST Pulmonary. Dr. Miles’s scholarly interests include implementation and effectiveness of educational curricula, clinical quality improvement through education, and creating resources for educators in pulmonary and critical care medicine. His clinical interests are in general pulmonary and critical care medicine, pulmonary physiology in health and disease, and interstitial lung diseases. His passion is to help people with lung disease breathe better through excellent patient-centered and evidence-based clinical care.”

Chad Ryan Marion, DO, PhD

Chad Marion, MD

Associate Program Director

Dr. Chad Marion is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in Pulmonary and Critical Care and has been associate program director of the pulmonary and critical care fellowship at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist since 2018. He completed his internal medicine residency at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH, and his fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT. Dr. Marion holds a Ph.D. in Investigative Medicine from Yale University, and his interests include medical education, conducting quality improvement projects, and foundation and industry-sponsored clinical trials.He is currently the director of the Adult Cystic Fibrosis Center and the Cystic Fibrosis Therapeutic Development Center at Wake Forest Baptist Health. He is also the director of the pulmonary block for preclinical medical students at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Dr. Marion is an active member of the assembly’s web committee and early career working group for the American Thoracic Society’s Assembly of Pulmonary Infection and Mycobacterium Tuberculosis. Dr. Marion’s scholarly activities include investigating effective treatments, quality improvement, and optimizing multidisciplinary management of complex airway diseases, particularly in cystic fibrosis and bronchiectasis not associated with cystic fibrosis. His clinical interests are in cystic fibrosis, bronchiectasis not related to cystic fibrosis, severe asthma, non-tuberculosis pulmonary disease, pneumonia, and critical care medicine.”

Jennifer Thi Wing Krall, MD

Jennifer Krall

Assistant PD, Research

Dr. Jennifer Krall is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in Pulmonary and Critical Care and has been fellowship assistant program director since 2025. She is a graduate of Indiana University School of Medicine and completed pulmonary and critical care fellowship training at Wake Forest in 2022. During fellowship, Dr. Krall was supported by an Institutional T32 Research Training Grant, which provided advanced training in translational pulmonary and critical care research.

As a physician-scientist, her research focus is on mechanisms of muscle wasting in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome and other critical illnesses. She also has interests in QI and clinical trials and is involved in research through the Wake Forest Critical Care Research group as well as the Cystic Fibrosis Therapeutics Development Center at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist. She has presented regionally, nationally, and internationally, and has earned recognition from the Wake Forest School of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine 15th Annual Research Symposium, the 16th Annual Respiratory Disease Young Investigators’ Forum, and the 2021 American Thoracic Society International Conference.

Dr. Krall is an active member of American Thoracic Society (ATS) and currently serves on the Programming committee for the Critical Care Assembly. She has also served as an instructor for the ATS resident boot camp.

Dr. Krall’s clinical interests are in ARDS, cystic fibrosis (CF) and non-CF bronchiectasis, as well as other chronic airway diseases.

Christopher Ghiathi, MD

Christopher Ghiathi

Assistant PD, Curriculum

Dr. Christopher Ghiathi is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in The Section of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Immunologic Diseases. Dr. Ghiathi completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency at The University of Washington, followed by pulmonary, critical care, and interventional pulmonary fellowship at The University of Pennsylvania. Clinically, Dr. Ghiathi focuses on diagnostic and therapeutic procedures of the lung and chest, with particular interest in thoracic oncology, complex benign airways disease, and pleural disease. His scholarly activity is focused on medical education with an emphasis on curriculum development and procedural education. His scholarship has resulted in awards from the Association of Pulmonary and Critical Care Program Directors for both Medical Education Research and Novel Medical Education Implementation.

Christina Bellinger, MD

Christina Bellinger, MD

Dr. Bellinger joined our faculty in 2012 and is currently the director of clinical bronchoscopy services. A board-certified interventional pulmonologist, she maintains a busy clinical practice in routine, advanced diagnostic, and interventional pulmonology. Her clinical and research interests include evaluation of bronchoscopic techniques, molecular diagnosis of lung cancer, and healthcare disparities in lung cancer screening.

Daniel Clark Files, MD

Clark Files, MD, Section Chief

Dr. Files joined our faculty in 2011 and is currently the section head for pulmonary, critical care, allergy and immunologic diseases. He is the site principal investigator for the NIH-funded PETAL network in addition to other trials funded by both NIH and industry. His clinical and research interests include ARDS recovery, critical-illness related muscle dysfunction, and testing new therapeutic strategies for critically ill patients. As co-director of the Wake Forest Critical Illness, Injury, and Recovery Research Center he helps direct critical care research activities of the health system.

Jessica Ann Palakshappa, MD, MS

Jessica Palakshappa, MD

Dr. Palakshappa joined the faculty at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 2017. Her research focuses on the intersection of critical care, aging, and implementation science. She is funded by an NIH career development award and uses mixed-methods to study the care we deliver to older adults in the intensive care unit and pulmonary clinic. She works as an attending in the medical intensive care unit and serves as the Associate Director of the Medical ICU.
William Irvin Mariencheck Jr., MD

William Mariencheck, MD

Dr. Mariencheck joined Wake Forest back in 2019. He came to Wake Forest after 19 years of work in a large physician owned private practice, multi-specialty group out of a large hospital in western Tennessee.