ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024

Jeremy Katzen, MD is a tenure track Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an investigator in the Penn-CHOP Lung Biology Institute. He clinically serves as an attending physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and as a Penn Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) Group provider. He obtained his Doctor of Medicine at the University of Rochester and then completed a residency in internal medicine at Northwestern University, followed by postdoctoral training in lung biology in Iasha Sznajder’s lab at Northwestern. In 2015 he came to the University of Pennsylvania for his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine. During his fellowship, he worked in Dr. Michael Beers’ laboratory, where he developed a line of study that married his clinical focus on lung fibrosis to his research interest in lung epithelial biology. This work focused on leveraging genetic mutations associated with pulmonary fibrosis, a devastating lung disease without significant therapeutics, to understand the proximal cellular events that drive lung fibrosis and to develop novel preclinical models for drug discovery. This work was published as first author manuscripts in JCI Insight and PNAS. He has received a Parker B. Francis Fellowship, multiple Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation research awards, and a NIH/NHLBI K08 grant to support his research.

Dr. Katzen opened his own lab in 2022, which focuses on the mechanisms of lung fibrosis, and specifically on understanding how stress signaling pathways in the lung epithelium initiates fibrotic remodeling. This work builds upon murine fibrosis models and iPSC modeling he has developed. His research has uncovered how epithelial stress signaling induces aberrant cell plasticity in fibrotic lung disease. More recently, he is focused on understanding how the lung epithelium drives fibrosis through direct signaling to the pulmonary mesenchyme.