Asli Sahin Yilmaz is professor and head of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at the University of the Health Sciences Kartal Dr. Lutfi Kırdar City Hospital in Istanbul, Turkey. Her areas of interest include endoscopic sinus and skull base surgery, thyroid and parathyroid surgery and allergy in ENT.

Jayant Pinto, MD, FACS, is Professor of Surgery in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Professor of Medicine in the Section of Geriatrics & Palliative Medicine in the Department of Medicine at The University of Chicago. In OHNS, he serves as director of Research and leads Rhinology and Allergy. He recently completed a 5-year term of Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.

As a practicing rhinologist/skull base surgeon, he treats the full range of conditions affecting the nose and sinuses, including inflammatory disease, tumors, and skull base lesions. He has completed major studies of the sinonasal microbiome, genomic studies of chronic rhinosinusitis, and the first trial of a biologic therapy for chronic rhinosinusitis. He also serves as a site investigator for numerous clinical trials for these conditions.

Dr. Pinto has an international reputation as an authority on human olfaction and aging, including environmental and genetic determinants and relationships with neurodegenerative disease and other health outcomes. His research program focuses on identifying risk factors for airway and sensory disorders in humans, including olfaction. Using epidemiologic approaches, Dr. Pinto has delineated the biodemographic, environmental, social, and genetic factors that underline olfactory dysfunction. Dr. Pinto’s group generated the first description of racial disparities, the first nationally representative results on the connection between smell impairment and mortality, dementia, and air pollution, respectively. He led AERONOSE (with Jennifer Weuve), an NIA funded study which seeks to connect air pollution exposure to pathology in the olfactory system. He currently leads two large scale NIA funded studies of olfaction, environmental exposures, aging, and cognition (NSHAP EXPOSOME and PARDOS APEX [with Marc Weisikopf and Bernardo Lemos ]). He also collaborates on major cohort studies to understand disease, aging, and function in a variety of contexts.

Dr. Pinto is a Chicago native. He attended college and medical school at Stanford University and completed clinical training and fellowship at The University of Chicago. He was then recruited to the faculty where he has served for just over 22 years.