ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
George A. Alba, MD's parents emigrated from Cuba; and in his parents' immediate families, his father was the only person to attend college in the United States. Dr. Alba earned his MD at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed both Internal Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Durin his postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr. Alba obtained a National Research Service Award (F32) from the NHLBI to study hypoxia and platelet-endothelial interactions in pulmonary thromboembolism. He identified that the scaffolding protein NEDD9 is upregulated by hypoxia in pulmonary artery endothelial cells, binds to P-Selectin on activated platelets, and NEDD9 inhibition decreases pathogenic platelet-endothelial cell adhesion in vitro and in vivo. This resulted in a (pending) scientific patent for thier novel anti-NEDD9 antibody. Dr. Alba joined Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 2018 supported by a Harvard KL2 and the MGH Center for Diversity and Inclusion. He currently investigates the role of NEDD9 in mediating thrombotic pulmonary vascular dysfunction in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). As Associate Director of the Pulmonary CORE clinic at MGH, Dr. Alba cares for and study the acute and long-term cardiopulmonary consequences of ARDS and oversee the research protocols aimed at clinically and molecularly phenotyping ARDS survivors. In this context, he co-directs the MGH Program for Advancing Critical Care Translational Science (PACCTS), a comprehensive biorepository for critical illness syndromes, and is a sub-investigator on the Boston COVID-19 Recovery Cohort, part of the multi-center NIH RECOVER study. Recently, Dr. Alba was awarded the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, a four-year K-equivalent career development award administered through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation intended to increase the diversity of academic medicine. Dr. Alba's project investigates anti-NEDD9 targeting as a novel therapeutic strategy for acute lung injury using animal models of ARDS. He is currently being promoted to Assistant Professor at HMS.