Kathryn Torok, MD

Dr. Kathryn Torok is the director of the Pediatric Scleroderma Clinic at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. She juggles seeing patients in the clinic, conducting her own research to help develop more effective therapies for localized and systemic scleroderma in children, and mentoring the next generation of pediatric rheumatologists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

She is the Principal Investigator of the National Registry of Childhood Onset Scleroderma (NRCOS) in which she collects standardized clinical assessments alongside blood and skin biopsies to investigate key molecules promoting scleroderma in kids and clinical associations. This is both initiated by her own research questions as well as collaboration with several other investigators to understand the immunophenotype of pediatric scleroderma to work towards better treatments and understanding of the disease.