Sally Wenzel, MD

  • Chair, Department of Occupational & Environmental Health
  • Professor of Medicine and Immunology
  • Director, University of Pittsburgh Asthma Institute at UPMC/UPSOM
  • Subsection Chief of Allergy, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy & Critical Care Medicine
  • UPMC Chair of Translational Airway Biology

Education & Training

  • MD, University of Florida, 1981
  • BS, University of Florida, 1978

Research Interest Summary

Pathobiology and mechanisms of asthma

Research Interests

Dr. Wenzel is one of seven NHLBI funded investigators in the Severe Asthma Research Program (SARP) network and Co-directs a PO1 on severe asthma with her collaborator, Dr. Anuradha Ray. Through SARP and her own efforts, Dr. Wenzel has accumulated a clinical database of over 500 subjects with asthma and healthy controls, most of whom have matching airway tissue, cells and sputum/lavage. Her lab is one of few which is able to match an extensive clinical phenotype of a subject with responses at a cellular/molecular level. She is developing rich databases of gene expression in asthma. Her current bench-lab interests include the role of epithelial cells in controlling airway inflammatory responses, oxidative and nitrative stress, as well as their interactions with mast cells and Th1 immune responses.