Thomas G. Pickering

Although he participated in a great deal of physiological research early in his career, Pickering's research in behavioral determinants and consequences of hypertension formed the heart of the program. Thus, Pickering was one of the earliest researchers to employ ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitoring, and contributed to the knowledge that clinic blood pressure measures are prone to both unsystematic and systematic errors, and are hence less useful for the prediction of target organ damage and adverse cardiovascular events than ABP. In the course of this research, he began to examine the nature of the errors more closely; for example, he was one of the first to identify the phenomenon of "white coat hypertension", in which patients exhibit poor blood pressure control only in the physician's office, leading to a false diagnosis of hypertension and unnecessary prescription of medication. Pickering was the Principal Investigator of a National Heart Lung and Blood institute Program Project that began in 1993 and has investigated several phenomena related to the behavioral causes and physiological consequences of hypertension, focusing on white coat hypertension, nocturnal blood pressure "dipping", race differences in PSG-assessed sleep quality and target organ damage, and the effects of work-related stress on blood pressure and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). The latter study remains one of the few prospective demonstrations that environmental stress is associated with hypertension and LVH.

In 1972, Pickering took up the position of Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University in New York City. Moving to Cornell University Medical School (now Weill Cornell Medicine) in 1974, Pickering held a number of positions over the next 24 years becoming Director of the Coronary Care Unit in 1981 and Professor of Medicine and Attending Physician in 1985. Here he undertook a program of research on behavioral aspects of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Pickering continued his work as Director of the Integrative and Behavioral Cardiology Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City in 2000, finally relocating to Columbia University Medical Center in New York City in 2003 to form the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health where he worked until his death in 2009.

Pickering was the son of Sir George Pickering, Oxford Regius Professor of Medicine. He began his career as house physician and surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital in London in 1967. He moved to the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford in 1968 to undertake a Medical Research Council Fellowship and then became a registrar within the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine.

Pickering received his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery at the University of Cambridge in 1966 followed by Membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1968. In 1970 he earned his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and gained Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians in 1980.

Thomas G. Pickering (1940 – 2009) was a British physician and academic. He was a professor of medicine at College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He was an internationally renowned expert in clinical hypertension and a leader in the fields of hypertension and cardiovascular behavioral medicine. He coined the term "white-coat hypertension" to describe those whose blood pressure was elevated in the doctor's office, but normal in everyday life. He later published the first editorial describing "masked hypertension" (the opposite phenomenon). He also discovered and gave his name to the Pickering Syndrome, where bilateral renal artery stenosis causes flash pulmonary edema.