About Steve Keller
Dr. Keller came to medicine through engineering. Trained first as an engineer and physicist, he spent his early career understanding complex physical systems before applying that same analytical approach to human physiology. That path shapes how he approaches critical care today. He sees organ failure not only as a clinical emergency but as an engineering problem, one where a deeper, quantitative understanding of how the body fails can lead to better ways to support and restore it. His work sits at the interface of these two worlds, translating the tools and mindset of engineering into care for patients facing the most severe forms of respiratory and circulatory failure.
Dr. Keller joined the Johns Hopkins Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine in March 2021 as an Assistant Professor and attends in the medical intensive care unit and the cardiac surgical intensive care unit. His primary clinical interest is the care of patients with critical illness, with a focus on advanced mechanical support of respiratory and circulatory failure.
Background
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Keller was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he served as the inaugural Medical Director of the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Service. He attended on the lung transplant service as well as in the medical and cardiac surgical intensive care units.
Education
Dr. Keller received his medical degree from Stanford University and completed residency training in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, followed by fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the National Institutes of Health.
Before pursuing a career in medicine, he earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University and a master’s in semiconductor physics from the University of Cambridge, where he studied as a Churchill Scholar. He received his doctorate in medical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded Department of Defense and National Science Foundation graduate fellowships.
Research Philosophy
Dr. Keller believes that the purpose of research is to change what happens at the bedside. His work is driven by a commitment to translation: moving discoveries beyond the laboratory and into real, usable solutions that improve how critically ill patients are cared for. He is particularly focused on bridging the gap between scientific insight and clinical practice, developing technologies robust enough to leave the research setting and reach the patients who need them. Realizing that goal often means building solutions that can be commercialized and brought to scale through partnership with industry, and he actively pursues collaborations that turn promising ideas into deployable, real-world therapies.