Courtney Fitzhugh received her B.S. magna cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1996 and her M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco in 2001. During medical school, Dr. Fitzhugh participated in the NIH Clinical Research Training Program, where she studied with Dr. John Tisdale in NIDDK/NHLBI. After receiving her M.D., Dr. Fitzhugh completed a joint internal medicine and pediatrics residency at Duke University Medical Center. In 2005, she did a combined adult hematology and pediatric hematology-oncology fellowship at the NIH and Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Fitzhugh returned to the NHLBI in 2007 and was appointed Assistant Clinical Investigator in 2012 and Lasker Clinical Research Scholar in 2016. She has received two NIH Director’s Awards for her commitment to improving the NIH culture and an NHLBI Director’s Award for extending transplant to patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) who lack a matched sibling donor. 

Dr. Fitzhugh is exploring new avenues of hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) for SCD. She is conducting a half-matched donor protocol to increase the number of people eligible for HCT, including those with compromised organ function who are at increased risk for early mortality. Dr. Fitzhugh is also interested in learning more about the long-term health effects of curative therapies in patients with SCD. She is collaborating with investigators through a U01 award to study the impact of curative treatments on organ function. Lastly, Dr. Fitzhugh and her team have shown that TP53 mutations found at the time of myeloid malignancy diagnosis were present at baseline in a few patients. They are now interested in exploring genetic risk factors for myeloid malignancy development after curative therapies for SCD. Altogether, Dr. Fitzhugh’s group seeks to develop a personalized approach to curative therapies for SCD.