Awarded in 2022
Home Department: Biochemistry, Medicine
Faculty Advisors: Mark Krasnow (Biochemistry) and Peter S. Kim (Biochemistry)

Research Title: Human Alveolar Stem Cells in Lung Regeneration, Repair, and Cancer

Research Description: Alveoli are the functional units of respiration and the sites of the most prominent and ineffectively treated diseases, including COVID-19 pneumonia. How disease initiation alters the dozens of diverse cell-types of the human lung to destroy the gas-exchange barrier remains unanswered. Timothy will develop a culture of human lung slices and apply single-cell labeling, deep-tissue imaging, and single-cell RNA-seq to define the three-dimensional structure of alveoli and dissect SARS-CoV-2 cell targets, elucidate the viral life cycle, and evaluate therapeutic efficacy at single cell resolution. He proposes this approach of systematic cellular and molecular dissection of disease pathogenesis as a general solution for studying human respiratory physiology and pathology.

WHERE IS HE NOW?

Timothy is a psychiatry resident in the Research Track at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he is working at the intersection of single cell genomics, molecular biology, and circuit neuroscience.