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

Research Title: Dissecting Human Respiratory Disease Initiation and Therapeutic Efficacy at Single Cell Resolution

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.