ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
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
Alicia Little, MD, PhD is Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine and Director of the Yale Vulvar Dermatology Clinic. She is a board-certified dermatologist and immunologist specializing in the study and care of patients with autoimmune skin diseases that disproportionately affect women, with a primary research focus on cutaneous lupus.
Cutaneous lupus is a disfiguring autoimmune skin disease, which may occur alone or in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. Dr. Little’s main research interests involve understanding T cells in cutaneous lupus disease pathogenesis. In Dr. Little’s post-doctoral and early faculty work, she performed human translational and mouse studies to identify tissue-adaptation and effector pathways activated in pathogenic T cells. She is continuing these investigations with the goal of developing novel therapeutics. She also has a developing research program studying similar pathways in lichen sclerosus, an autoimmune skin disease that most commonly affects female anogenital skin, causing scarring and predisposing to cancer development.
Dr. Little’s research aims to advance science in women’s health dermatology. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIAMS), Dermatology Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Yale, and Robert E. Leet and Clara Guthrie Patterson Trust. Her scientific work has been published in high-impact scientific journals, including PNAS, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Nature Medicine, and JAMA Dermatology. She is a member of the International Society for the Study of Vulvovaginal Disease, the Women’s Dermatologic Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology. Dr. Little completed her undergraduate education at Amherst College and then received her MD and PhD in immunobiology at Yale University. She completed residency in dermatology followed by post-doctoral research under the mentorship of Joseph Craft, MD, at Yale University, where she now sees patients and performs translational research in the Department of Dermatology.