ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2020
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
Hrishikesh S. Kulkarni, MD, MSCI, is an Instructor of Medicine at the Washington University in St. Louis. He completed his medical school from Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital in Mumbai, India, and moved to the United States in 2009 to pursue a career as a physician-scientist. He first worked at the University of California, San Francisco on the role of TLR2 agonists in acute lung injury, followed by a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He subsequently joined Washington University School of Medicine for a fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, and joined faculty in 2018 as a transplant pulmonologist.
During his postdoctoral training, he demonstrated that airway epithelial cells are unique in having intracellular stores of the complement protein C3, and these stores can be augmented to mitigate cell death. Since then, he has developed in vitro and in vivo approaches to test these observations, and has been dissecting the mechanism by which these intracellular proteins contribute to cellular survival. He will be starting his laboratory as an Assistant Professor in July 2020. He will continue to utilize models of bacterial pneumonia, and collaborate with the Division of Surgery to test the role of complement proteins in modulating immune responses in experimental lung transplantation. A major focus of their work will involve distinguishing the role of locally-derived complement proteins in the lung from those present in the blood, and how they modulate the development of acute lung injury.
Dr. Kulkarni's work is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, American Lung Association and Children's Discovery Institute. The overarching goal of his research program is to determine how epithelial cell-derived proteins can be harnessed to mitigate the risk of acute lung injury in various settings, to ultimately reduce the burden of end-stage lung disease.