Julian Solway,MD, the Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor for Medicine and Pediatrics, Dean for Translational Medicine and Vice Chair for Research, has been awarded the 2020 American Thoracic Society’s (ATS) Recognition Award for Scientific Accomplishment in honor of his “outstanding scientific contributions in basic or clinical research to enhance the understanding, prevention and treatment of respiratory disease or critical illness”. Awardees are selected based on contributions made throughout their careers or for major contributions made at a particular point in their careers.
Dr. Solway is an authority on asthma and has a robust research program funded by the NIH and other organizations for more than 28 years. His research focuses on finding more effective treatments for asthma. He is an expert in pulmonary medicine, and under his leadership, scientists and clinicians work to translate pulmonary research into new treatments for the public. Dr. Solway has extensive experience studying airway smooth muscle (ASM) function and dysfunction in asthma, having studied smooth muscle specific gene transcription, protein accumulation, and hypertrophy, and signaling mechanisms that regulate these; ASM contraction and its reversal, and the mechanisms that regulate these; and ASM mediated-airway narrowing, airway constrictor responsiveness, and lung function in both animal models and humans. Additional studies address asthma genetics and therapeutics in mechanistic and therapeutic clinical studies and preclinical development of novel asthma treatments. Recently, he has focused on the inhibition of pulmonary fibrosis and on the inhibition of breast cancer metastasis using novel small molecules discovered in our asthma studies.
Dr. Solway has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, as well as chapters in leading textbooks on lung biology, asthma, and pulmonary pharmacology. He serves as Chair of the Committee on Molecular Medicine and is founding Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine, home of the University of Chicago’s NIH/NCATS CTSA award. He has served as the CTSA Consortium as a co-Chair, Steering Committee member, and co-Chair of the Strategic Goal 3 and Collaboration/Engagement Domain Task Force.
More information may be found here: https://conference.thoracic.org/program/respiratory-health-awards.php