ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2024

Narges Alipanah-Lechner, MD, MAS is a post-doctoral fellow in the division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Alipanah-Lechner’s research interests started in her undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins University in the field of tuberculosis. Before her post-doctoral research focus on ARDS, she had already published several first-authored manuscripts and was a key contributor to national and international public health guidelines for tuberculosis treatment. As a pulmonary and critical care fellow during the COVID-19 pandemic, she was humbled by the limits of therapies to alter the course of syndromes of critical illness. Spurred by similar findings in patients with tuberculosis, she became passionate about studying the biologic heterogeneity of patients with sepsis and ARDS as an important hurdle in identifying effective pharmacotherapies. During her F32 funded post-doctoral fellowship at UCSF, she underwent dedicated training in computational methods and obtained a master’s degree in biostatistics and clinical epidemiology. Her long-term goal is to use complementary systems biology approaches within precision medicine, including metabolomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics, to improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients with sepsis and ARDS. In addition to her research, she attends in the medical intensive care unit at the UCSF Moffitt-Long Hospital as well as the UCSF Pulmonary Function Laboratory.