Martin J. Tobin

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Martin John Tobin is an Irish-American critical care physician and pulmonologist who is widely recognized for his work on acute respiratory failure, mechanical ventilation, and the control of breathing. The American Thoracic Society calls him a top scholar in critical care medicine, and The Lancet described his textbook Principles And Practice of Mechanical Ventilation as the “Bible” of the field. He has written and edited several textbooks on critical care and was the editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine from 1999 to 2004.

Tobin was born in Freshford, County Kilkenny, Ireland. He trained at University College Dublin, earning his medical degree in 1975. He then held a British Thoracic Association Research Fellowship at King’s College Hospital in London with Philip Hugh-Jones, and pursued pulmonary training at the University of Miami (1980–1982) and a critical care fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1990, he joined the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and in 1991 he became Professor of Medicine and Anesthesiology at Loyola University Chicago. He works as a pulmonologist at Edward Hines Jr. Veterans Administration Hospital and Loyola University Medical Center near Chicago.

In 2022, Tobin received the University College Dublin Alumni Award in Research, Innovation and Impact. In 1991, he and Karl L. Yang described two important indices for weaning from mechanical ventilation: the rapid shallow breathing index (RSBI) and the CROP index (Compliance, Respiratory rate, Oxygenation, and Maximal inspiratory pressure).

In April 2021, Tobin testified as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Derek Chauvin trial concerning George Floyd’s death. He explained that Floyd’s death was primarily due to low oxygen from airway obstruction and compression caused by the position on the street and the knee on Floyd’s neck and back. He discussed how narrowing of the airway, especially the hypopharynx, makes breathing much harder, and used physics-based reasoning to illustrate how severe narrowing increases the effort required to breathe. He also testified that fentanyl at 11 ng/mL, while elevated, was not the cause of death, and that carbon monoxide poisoning was unlikely.