The professorship was established in 1997 to honor the memory of Donald B. Strominger, M.D., a professor of clinical pediatrics who died in 1983 at age 54.

"Bob Strunk is the perfect Strominger professor," said Alan L. Schwartz, M.D., Ph.D., the Harriet B. Spoehrer Professor and head of the Department of Pediatrics. "He is a caring, compassionate and skilled clinician; he is a wonderful and engaging teacher; and he is an international leader in clinical research in pediatric asthma."

Strunk is an expert on childhood asthma who has worked to discover which children are at high risk of dying from the disease. Additionally, he studies long-term outcomes of childhood asthma, community approaches to improving asthma care in economically-disadvantaged children and interventions in emergency departments that promote regular care for asthma by pediatricians.

Since 1992, Strunk has directed the St. Louis site of the Childhood Asthma Management Program, the largest and most comprehensive study to determine whether aggressive treatment of asthma during childhood can preserve lung function as children become adults. He also is the St. Louis site director of the Pediatric Asthma Clinical Research Network, a National Institutes of Health consortium, and is founder and director of the Community Asthma Program. This program is a joint effort between BJC HealthCare and Washington University School of Medicine to help primary-care physicians deliver care to asthmatic patients more effectively and efficiently.

Strunk has published more than 100 scientific articles. He received an Allergic Disease Academic Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped fund his research from 1983-88, and he was a director of the Board of Allergy and Immunology from 1988-1995. He is a member of the American Thoracic Society and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.

A professor of pediatrics in the medical school since 1987, Strunk earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Northwestern University and a medical degree from the Northwestern University School of Medicine. After a pediatric internship at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital and a fellowship in allergy and immunology at Boston Children's Hospital, he held faculty positions at the University of Arizona and at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, University of Colorado.