19th century UPMC Presbyterian dates back to the early ideas of Louise Wotring Lyle, the wife of a local Presbyterian minister, Joseph Lyle. Lyle had attended medical school years earlier, but failed out due to the prejudice of male administrators. Lyle (along with other prominent females) founded the Women's Medical College of Cincinnati, later graduating with her MD from the college, she returned to Pittsburgh to open up a Presbyterian-based hospital. As Lyle was working with limited funds, she had founded the hospital with only five dollars and a line of credit UPMC Presbyterian was founded as Presbyterian Hospital in 1893 by Lyle in what was then the town of
Allegheny, which became the north side of Pittsburgh in 1907, when it was annexed by the city. Two years later, Lyle founded the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing, which later became the
University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing.
20th century In 1910, the hospital moved to a new location near the original. The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine then worked out informal agreements for teaching and staffing privileges with a number of local hospitals to train their medical students and residents. At the same time, Presbyterian hospital started to go through financial hardships that led to the eventual move to the new hospital funded by the University of Pittsburgh. In the mid-1920's, the University of Pittsburgh and its
School of Medicine desired to establish an academic medical center on their campus, and by the mid-1920s had formed a plan with a coalition of city hospitals to have them relocate to the
Oakland neighborhood of the city that the university had itself moved to in 1909. On November 1, 1926,
Children's became the first hospital in the Oakland neighborhood on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, with Presbyterian Hospital making plans to occupy the adjacent site. The university provided Presbyterian Hospital, then located on the
North Side, with a tract of land on its campus for construction of a new hospital which broke ground in 1930 and was subsequently opened in 1938. By the end of the 1930s, the
University of Pittsburgh had helped to form the "University Medical Center" which included Falk Clinic,
Children's, Eye and Ear, Libby Steele Magee, Presbyterian, and Women's Hospital, as well as the planned
Municipal Hospital. Through the years, the university and the hospitals moved toward an ever-tightening alliance. In 1965, the university, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic which was managed by the School of Medicine, Presbyterian-University,
Magee and Women's, Eye and Ear, and Children's Hospitals incorporated the University Health Center of Pittsburgh (UHCP). In 1969, Montefiore Hospital joined UHCP. In 1947,
Jonas Salk took a job at the University of Pittsburgh as an associate professor of bacteriology and the head of the Virus Research Lab. While at Pitt, he began research on
polio and the process of developing a vaccination. In 1952, Salk had created the first Polio vaccination. Salk went on CBS radio to report a successful study on a small group of adults and children and two days later Salk published the results of the study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association. In the 1970s, a new model of administration, in which clinical revenues were invested into research, was implemented at Western Psychiatric under the leadership of
Thomas Detre. After guiding the psychiatric institute to become one of the largest recipients of
National Institute of Health funding, Detre assumed leadership overseeing all six of the university's schools of health sciences in the early 1980s. Implementing the same administrative model in those units, the collective schools of the health sciences and medical center were ultimately transformed into one of the largest centers for biomedical research in the nation. In the 1970s, the name of the hospital was changed to Presbyterian-University Hospital to reflect the increased academic affiliation. In 1981, a pioneering surgeon called the Father of Transplantation, Dr.
Thomas E. Starzl came to the hospital, on condition that he would be free of administrative tasks and able to focus on medicine. In a matter of a few years he launched the country's first pediatric and adult liver transplant program. On February 14, 1984, under the direction of Starzl, Drs. Byers W. Shaw Jr. and Henry T. Bahnson successfully completed the world's' first simultaneous
heart and
liver organ transplant on six-year-old
Stormie Jones at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. During his tenure, Starzl also pioneered the use of a new anti-rejection drug called
tacrolimus. Starzl was the head of transplantation at the hospital until 1991 when he stepped down from clinical and surgical duties and shifted all of his focus to research. On September 9, 1984, a story was published by author
Andrew Schneider in
The Pittsburgh Press criticizing the hospitals' use of unsupervised first and second-year residents in the emergency departments. The article went on to say that these practices were compromising patient care and the education of the residents. A week later, on September 16,
The Pittsburgh Press published another article criticizing the original article and claiming that many claims made by Schneider were false or industry standard. Ground was broken in 1982, and in January 1986 a new tower called the "Main Tower" was opened at the neighboring Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. The opening was delayed after a slight issue led to a leaking pipe, damaging the lobby at Presbyterian. The Main Tower had a rooftop
heliport with connections to UPMC Presbyterian Hospital that were accessed through multiple floors. While the tower belonged to Children's, its radiology department was shared by Children's and Presbyterian Hospital. In 1986, Presbyterian merged with the nearby Montefiore Hospital to create the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, later changing the name to UPMC Presbyterian. Under Starzl, by 1988 Presbyterian Hospital had grown to have one of the world's largest transplant programs with more than half of the worlds' transplants taking place at Presbyterian. In the 1990s, the name of the hospital was changed from Presbyterian-University Hospital to Presbyterian University Hospital because hospital CEO, Jeffrey Romoff wanted a more unified branding after the merger with nearby Montefiore Hospital.
21st century In January 2001, American Nobel Prize laureate,
Herbert A. Simon underwent surgery at UPMC Presbyterian to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen. Although the surgery was successful, Simon later succumbed to the complications that followed. The old Children's Hospital location was closed on May 2, 2009, when the hospital moved to the new location in the
Lawrenceville neighborhood. The original children's building was demolished in 2011 and the main tower with the helipad remained standing (as Presbyterian South) until the helipad and laboratories could move over to the Presbyterian building in 2013. The façade to Presbyterian now just consists of the renovated old bridge between Presbyterian and Children's which was completed in 2016 at a cost of $28.7 million. In 2013, UPMC Presbyterian finished construction on their new rooftop helipad for critical transports. The need for the new helipad came from the fact that the previous helipad was located on the old Children's Hospital tower which was scheduled to be demolished. The helipad is operated by
Stat Medevac, a Pittsburgh-based emergency transport organization who also maintains a dispatch center at UPMC Presbyterian. On October 27, 2018, a man with anti-Semitic views entered
Tree of Life synagogue and started to open fire upon the worshippers inside. In total, 11 people were killed and 8 people were injured with the majority of the injured taken to the trauma center at UPMC Presbyterian, with fewer taken to
UPMC Mercy and
Allegheny General Hospital, the other two Pittsburgh trauma centers. In the aftermath of the shooting, United States
President Donald Trump and
First Lady Melania Trump travelled to Pittsburgh to visit the injured police officers, victims, and medics at the hospital. During the ongoing
2020 COVID-19 pandemic, UPMC Presbyterian (as with all UPMC Hospitals) limited their visiting policies and introduced updated visiting guidelines to help stop the spread of the virus through hospital visits. In the wake of the pandemic, the University of Pittsburgh announced that the student dormitory, Lothrop Hall would be opened to house doctors and other healthcare providers from UPMC Presbyterian and nearby hospital, UPMC Montefiore. Later that year in July 2020, UPMC Presbyterian had to shut down one of its patient care units after multiple staff tested positive from the unit, moving patients from the unit to others in the hospital while a deep cleaning took place. UPMC Presbyterian also leads all hospitals in Western Pennsylvania in COVID-19 clinical trials and new drug therapies, and has the most in federal aid to help find drugs and fund clinical trials. On December 14, the first doses of the
Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Pennsylvania were issued to healthcare workers. Charmaine Pykosh, an acute care nurse in the surgical/intensive care unit at UPMC Presbyterian in Pittsburgh, received the first dose of the vaccine in Pennsylvania. On September 26, 2018, UPMC unveiled plans for a new 18-story, tower with 620 private rooms, UPMC Heart and Transplant Hospital at UPMC Presbyterian on the site of the former Children's Hospital. The hospital is designed to highlight the world-famous transplant program at UPMC, made famous by pioneer,
Dr. Thomas Starzl. UPMC Heart and Transplant Hospital will be the region's largest hospital dedicated to one specialty. The patient care units at Presbyterian will be converted to offices after the tower opens. UPMC has also announced that they would be partnering with technology firm
Microsoft to build the hospitals, integrating technology into the design to help reduce the friction between technology and healthcare workers. In May 2021, UPMC announced that the new date for construction would be in the second quarter of 2022 due to a mixture of both the COVID-19 pandemic and labor shortages. In August, the plans for the tower had been changed to 17-stories and 636
beds. In December 2021, UPMC announced that they had bought another section of land adjacent to the site and started meeting with local community and planning boards with the hope to begin construction on the new hospital by the end of 2022. In June 14, 2022, UPMC broke ground on the $1.5 billion tower. On October 1, 2024, the tower was
topped out. On July 22, 2025, a local couple
philanthropists donated $65 million for the tower, after the donation it was named the Daniel G and Carole L Kamin Tower. In December, the cost of the tower was reduced to $1.3 billion. The Daniel G and Carole L Kamin Tower is expected to open January 24, 2027. ==Teaching hospital==