Nicholas Lukacs, PhD, Receives an Outstanding Investigator Award

By Brooke Dougherty-Reyes | March 5 2020

Nicholas LukacsNicholas Lukacs, PhD, The Godfrey Dorr Stobbe Professor of Pathology, received an Outstanding Investigator Award (OIA or an R35) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) entitled, “Viral and allergen-driven immunity in chronic lung disease.” This award will provide 7 years of funding.

The purpose of the NHLBI Outstanding Investigator Award is to promote scientific productivity and innovation by providing long-term support and increased flexibility to experienced Program Directors/Principal Investigators (PD/PIs) who are currently PD/PIs on at least two NHLBI R01-equivalent awards and whose outstanding record of research demonstrates their ability to make major contributions to heart, lung, blood, and sleep research. The OIA is intended to support a research program, rather than a research project, by providing the primary and most likely sole source of NHLBI funding on individual grant awards.

Project Narrative:
The development of chronic severe asthma continues to be more completely elucidated to further understand the mechanisms that can be targeted for therapeutic intervention. This proposal will explore the novel processes in order to better understand the genesis of the overall pulmonary disease process, focusing on the neonatal studies as well as in later chronic disease to identify interactions of immune mediators that drive structural changes during lung development and repair processes.