ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

Elizabeth Crouch, MD, PhD, is a neuroscientist, a vascular biologist, and a physician in Neonatal-Perinatal medicine. Her lab, the Neurovascular Development lab at crouchlab.ucsf.edu, studies how brain blood vessels grow and interact with other brain cells. In part, this interest is inspired by germinal matrix hemorrhage, a complication of preterm birth that she cares for clinically. This hemorrhage can cause hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy, and death, and unfortunately there are currently no treatments. It remains unclear why vasculature in this developmental window is particularly sensitive. Her research resolves around defining the stages of vascular stem cells in the developing brain and understanding the mechanisms that regulate their functions. She then applies this knowledge to produce novel technologies and therapeutic strategies for different brain hemorrhages in neonatal and pediatric patients. Towards these goals, she utilizes neuropathological specimens, flow cytometry (FACS), bioinformatics, and cell culture, including organoid models. She has a track record of success in brain vascular biology, as the first to isolate endothelial and mural cells with Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) in the adult mouse (Crouch et al 2015, 2018) and the prenatal human brain (Crouch et al 2022).

Dr. Crouch obtained her MD/PhD degrees at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons followed by training in Pediatrics and Neonatology at University of California, San Francisco. She is grateful to have been funded in her work by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative. For fun, she runs the BreakingDownBiology blog (also funded by UCSF ImmunoX) to explain exciting scientific journal articles with every day language.