Innovation and Experience

Watching children develop and thrive in her care drew Kerstin Gerhold, MD, PhD, MSc, to pediatrics, chronic diseases and especially rheumatic diseases, in a career that now spans three countries. She was recently named the new chief of Pediatric Rheumatology at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and The University of Tennessee (UT) Health Science Center.

“I liked the idea of following kids from a young age on,” Gerhold said. “It is just nice to see these kids thriving despite a chronic disease.” 

When Gerhold was young, she watched her grandfather, a general practitioner, care for those in need in their small, German village. Even as a kid, she knew she wanted to go into pediatrics. Upon her high school graduation, she chose a career as clinician.

Le Bonheur’s new chief of Pediatric Rheumatology Kerstin Gerhold, MD, PhD, MSc, career spans three countries, and she specializes in caring for patients with chronic pain.

Gerhold spent many years of her life training and working at The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Charité – Berlin University Medicine), one of Europe’s largest university hospitals. After completing her training, she worked as a pediatrician and pediatric rheumatologist at the hospital for 16 years. She was drawn in by rheumatology’s “detective work.” 

“I had a mentor there who was always called to the most complicated cases that nobody could solve and that was fascinating to me,” Gerhold said. “That’s how my interest came to rheumatology.”   

She was also spurred on by the success in her work as new treatments — biologics — came to the field at the end of the 1990s. She recalled treating a young teenager of around 12 or 13 with juvenile ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic inflammatory arthritis that affects the spine and other joints in children and young adults. The patient “could hardly bend over he was so stiff in his back,” Gerhold said. The team used a new medication, and the patient was soon playing sports again.  

Here, Gerhold also started her research career in a basic immunology lab investigating measures to prevent allergies and asthma, and she also became passionate about longitudinal observational studies in the field of adult and pediatric rheumatology.    

In 2014, Gerhold moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to take on the role as head of the section of Pediatric Rheumatology and an associate professor of Pediatrics at the University of Manitoba.  

With her passion for patients with chronic pain, she founded an interdisciplinary clinic for children and adolescents with chronic pain at the Children’s Hospital of Manitoba. Patients presented with chronic musculoskeletal pain, chronic abdominal pain, chronic headaches, often everything together. They would often have stressors in their lives, possibly driving or triggering that pain. At the time, Manitoba was the only province with a university-affiliated hospital that did not have such a clinic. 

“I am very passionate about care of patients with rheumatic disease and chronic pain, and it has been hard to see that resources are very limited for these patients,” Gerhold said. “Unfortunately, management of chronic pain does not reimburse like a surgery.” 

She found health care utilization and costs to be higher for pediatric patients with chronic pain than for patients with inflammatory bowel disease, juvenile arthritis, diabetes and anxiety. 

“This is why we need better resources for these patients, so that they don’t go from doctor to doctor to try to figure out what is wrong with them but never receiving adequate treatment,” she said.

In 2021, Gerhold moved again. This time to the United States to serve as pediatric rheumatologist and pain specialist at the Mississippi Center for Advanced Medicine in Madison, Miss., a few miles north of Jackson. 

She joined Le Bonheur Children’s in February 2025 to serve as chief of Pediatric Rheumatology and a professor at UT Health Science Center. 

Gerhold says she is excited to care for patients in interdisciplinary teams, sharing experience and knowledge with others – physicians and allied health care professionals alike. The most important team members to Gerhold, though, are the patients and their families. 

“I also like to bring expertise, fresh thoughts and creativity to an organization,” she said. “I felt Le Bonheur's openness to innovation and the provided prospects to perform research and teaching would be a wonderful match.”

 Gerhold brings her knowledge of three health care systems and treating many different populations with often rare diseases or unusual courses of rheumatic diseases to her department. 

“In Berlin, we had a huge population of patients from the Middle East with particular and often rare diseases,” Gerhold said. “In Winnipeg, we were one of the largest centers in Canada for indigenous patients from remote communities.”

“You see diseases presenting in different ways. Now, at Le Bonheur, of course, you have, again, a different population not only from a physical perspective but also really from a cultural perspective. And I am more and more convinced that our culture contributes a lot to our diseases.” 

When she’s not working, Gerhold enjoys the outdoors, art, travel, cooking, baking and spending time with friends and family.

Kerstin Gerhold, MD, PhD, MSc

Education and Training

• Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany – Medical School, Residency, Pediatric Rhuematology Fellowship
• Berlin School of Public Health, Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany – Master of Science in Epidemiology

Board Certifications

• Pediatrics and Pediatric Rheumatology, Berlin Chamber of Physicians, Germany

Society Memberships

• Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA)
• Pediatric Rheumatology European Society (PRES)
• International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), Special Interest Group on Pain in Childhood
• American College of Rheumatology
• Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kinder- und Jugendrheumatologie (German Society for Pediatric Rhuematology)