ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2021
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
Lena Heung, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with a joint appointment as a Health Sciences Assistant Clinical Professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. She earned her MD and PhD degrees in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Medical University of South Carolina. She completed a residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Baystate Medical Center/Tufts University School of Medicine and an Infectious Diseases fellowship at the University of Washington and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In her PhD work, she identified a novel lipid-mediated signaling pathway that regulates virulence of the opportunistic fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. During her fellowship, she began investigating host immune mechanisms that determine the outcomes of C. neoformans infections. She discovered that the fungus is able to subvert inflammatory monocytes by harnessing host signaling pathways that repress the anti-fungal activity of these cells. Her work has been supported by fellowship awards from the Stony Wold-Herbert Fund and the Dana Foundation. In 2017, she obtained a K08 Career Development Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Currently, her laboratory is studying the role of the DAP12 signaling adapter in integrating C. neoformans sensing and downstream effector functions in monocytes. Additionally, the lab is investigating unique cellular and molecular mechanisms in the host response to the emerging fungal pathogen Cryptococcus gattii.