Dr. Richard Wallace board certified physician in internal medicine and infectious disease and who has specialized in the treatment of nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) disease for the past 43 years. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin and his M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He also completed internship, residency, and fellowship at the Boston City Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, with additional fellowship training at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Dr. Wallace has extensive academic and research experience having served as Associate Professor of Research and Medicine from 1982 until 1987, and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Professor of Microbiology and Medicine since 1987 at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (UTHCT).
Dr. Wallace holds memberships in several professional societies including the American Society for Microbiology, American Thoracic Society, International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, and Texas Medical Association. He has been elected to fellowships in the American College of Chest Physicians, American College of Physicians, Infectious Disease Society of America, and the prestigious American Academy of Microbiology.
Previously, he has served on various clinical and research journal editorial boards including the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Seminars in Respiratory Infections and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, and also is a regular contributor to these and other medical and research journals. He also was chairman of the Mycobacteriology Division of the American Society for Microbiology from 1998-1999, member for the U.S. Public Health Service Task Force on Prophylaxis and Therapy for Mycobacterium avium-intracellulare complex (MAC) in 1992, and a past chairman of the Scientific Assembly of Microbiology, Tuberculosis, and Pulmonary Infections of the American Thoracic Society. Dr. Wallace is also an advisor to Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI), Subcommittee on Antimycobacterial Susceptibility Testing, and an advisor on the CLSI Subcommittee on Laboratory Diagnosis of Mycobacterial Infections. He also was appointed to the American Thoracic Society (ATS) Committee for the revision of the guidelines of the ATS statement on the diagnosis and treatment of nontuberculous mycobacteria.
Dr. Wallace has received numerous awards for his mycobacterial clinical and research work. He was the recipient of the Gardner Middlebrook Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mycobacteriology in 1999 at the National Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, the Sir MacFarlane Burnet Award at the National Meeting of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases in South Australia in 2002, and is a lifetime honorary member of the Australasian Society for Infectious Disease in 2002.
Dr. Wallace has published more than 300 scientific papers with more than half of them related to nontuberculous mycobacteria, including MAC, and is a frequent invited speaker at national and international meetings. He directs a research laboratory that focuses on drug susceptibility testing, DNA molecular fingerprinting of NTM, molecular mechanisms of drug resistance in NTM, and treatment trials of drugs for MAC and Mycobacterium abscessus.
*Dr. Wallace is a consulting physician but currently does not see patients routinely in the clinic.