Ryan Maves, MD, FCCP
Ryan Maves, MD, FCCP
Community-acquired pneumonia is a perennially hot topic for pulmonologists—and CHEST 2026 will be no different, said Chest Infections and Disaster Response Network Chair Ryan Maves, MD, FCCP.
“There’s been a lot of new data coming out this year that we’d like to share with everyone, particularly around patients in the outpatient setting,” he said. “Challenging Community-Acquired Pneumonia Decisions With the 2025 ATS Clinical Practice Guidelines will cover insights into the changes and how those changes came to be—and what we've learned to influence those guidelines.”
Additionally, endemic infections, rare-but-deadly pulmonary pathogens, and changes in vaccine policy also will be major topics of discussion at CHEST 2026.
Valley fever (coccidioidomycosis or “cocci”) will be the focus of Update on Endemic Fungi: Effects of Climate Change and Immunosuppression on Endemic Fungal Diseases. Arizona is considered a hotspot for Valley fever, an infection that affects the lungs and is more common in Western states.
“It would be remiss to ignore cocci in the universe’s ‘epicenter’ of cocci,” Dr. Maves said. “It’s probably expanding in range in part because of climate change and changes in the natural environment but also because it’s diagnosed and recognized more often.”
On a related note, several sessions will cover the pulmonary aspects of climate change, the respiratory impacts of wildfire, and the changing geographic ranges of infectious diseases, such as Climate Change as a Mass Casualty Threat: Implications for Critical Care Systems.
And when it comes to sessions for mid-career clinicians, Dr. Maves said not to miss High Risk, High Mortality: Critical ID Challenges in Patients Who Are Immunocompromised.
“It's pretty much every day when I'm the consult attending and there is some novel immunosuppressive agent that I have never heard of before that knocks out a different arm of the immune system,” he said. “Figuring out how to approach those patients, how to recognize them, and how to manage them quickly and acutely is essential. That's certainly one where even I need an update–and I do that literally for a living.”
He’s also looking forward to High-Consequence Infectious Threats in Critical Care, which will dive into what Dr. Maves calls low-incidence but high-consequence pathogens.
“A big focus of these talks will be on how to recognize a novel high-consequence respiratory pathogen,” he explained. “What do you need to do in suspected cases? How do you actually operationalize that? What are the things we need to do when we suspect an entity? What is the next step in terms of formal identification, notification of public health authorities, and collaboration with other groups to see if they need, for example, a biocontainment unit?”
Dr. Maves got his start in infectious disease before he retrained in critical care. He first attended the CHEST Annual Meeting in 2016.
“I don’t think I’ve missed one since,” he said. “When you're in academics, you speak at a number of meetings. For me, the CHEST meeting has always been very educational, very informative, and arguably the most fun.”
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