William Joel Meggs

Who is William Joel Meggs?

William Joel Meggs is a board-certified internal medicine and emergency medicine physician, allergist and immunologist, and medical toxicologist with “interests in envenomations, antidotes, and environmental toxicology. Dr. Meggs currently practices in Greenville, NC, where he is a professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Division of Toxicology at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University.

Dr. Meggs was born and raised in Newberry, South Carolina. He then attended Clemson University where he obtained a BS in Physics and subsequently completed a PhD in physics at Syracuse University. He was a research physicist at the University of Rochester from 1969–1971 and at McGill University in Montreal, Canada from 1971-1977. Meggs departed from academic physics to pursue medicine afterward, and achieved a Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Miami in 1979. He then completed an Internal Medicine residency at Rochester General Hospital in 1982. Meggs then served as a Medical Staff Fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health from 1982-1985. He obtained board certification in Emergency Medicine in 1988. While his career path has been varied, Dr. Meggs' main contributions to medicine have been in the arenas of Emergency Medicine and Medical Toxicology. Since 1991, Meggs has been affiliated with the Emergency Department at Vidant Medical Center, in Greenville, North Carolina, which is the flagship teaching hospital for the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. During his first few years with the PCMH Emergency Department, Meggs successfully completed a fellowship in Medical Toxicology at the New York City Poison Center and Department of Emergency Medicine, Bellevue Hospital Center, affiliated with New York University. He currently serves as professor and chief of the Toxicology Department of the ECU Emergency Medicine Residency program.