ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2024
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Liz Traxler, MD, PhD, is a physician scientist and fellow in hematology/oncology at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, where her clinical and research interests focus on patients with classical hematology disorders including hemoglobinopathies. She pursued her MD/PhD training at the Perelman School of Medicine, completing her graduate thesis work in Dr. Mitchell Weiss’s laboratory. Her studies centered on red blood cell development and novel therapies for sickle cell disease and thalassemia using genome editing. This work culminated in first and co-first author manuscripts in Nature Medicine, Blood, and Developmental Cell.
Her clinical experiences cemented her desire to improve the care for patients with hemoglobinopathies including sickle cell disease and thalassemia. During hematology fellowship, she joined Dr. Gerd Blobel’s lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for her post-doctoral research, where her work builds on her graduate studies on hemoglobinopathies. She optimized a customized genome scale CRISPR screening platform to identify novel regulators of fetal hemoglobin, with the aim to pinpoint pathways for drug candidates. She has been recognized for clinical excellence with the Jane Alavi Clinical Excellence Award and was appointed chief fellow. For her research, she received the Research Training Award for Fellows through the American Society of Hematology, and the Penn Measey Scholars Program in Molecular Medicine in 2023. In the long-term as a physician scientist, she envisions an independent research program at the nexus of classical hematology, genetics, and developmental biology.