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
Parker C. Wilson, MD, PhD focuses his clinical and research efforts on exploring the pathways that contribute to kidney disease progression. He recently accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania and will be starting his lab there in January 2023. The Wilson laboratory will be in the Division of Diagnostic Innovation and will focus on analyzing kidney tissue with single cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and other high-throughput NGS-based methods. Dr. Wilson is particularly interested in modeling the effects of germline and somatic variation as they relate to kidney disease progression at the single cell level. These efforts will be supported by the Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center, which is a brand new research collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that aims to bring kidney researchers together across institutions.
Dr. Wilson did his residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology followed by a fellowship in Renal and Genitourinary Pathology at Yale. He did a second fellowship in Molecular Genetic Pathology at Washington University in St. Louis where he began collaborating with his research mentor, Dr. Benjamin Humphreys. Dr. Humphreys is a pioneer in single cell sequencing and working in his lab has given Dr. Wilson the opportunity to apply his expertise in computer science and genetics. Since arriving at Washington University in July 2019, they have co-authored 7 original manuscripts and 6 review articles. Some of the highlights include a first-author paper in PNAS describing the first single cell RNA sequencing analysis of human diabetic kidney disease, a co-first author paper in Nature Communications describing the first integrated analysis of single cell RNA and ATAC sequencing in human kidney, and another co-first author paper in Nature Communications describing the first integrated analysis of single cell RNA and ATAC sequencing in human diabetic kidney disease.