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Crotty Alexander Lab

Principal Investigator

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Dr. Laura Crotty Alexander completed her undergraduate and medical degrees at Duke University, followed by Internal Medicine residency and Pulmonary Critical Care fellowship training at Harvard. She has conducted research at Duke, the NIH, Massachusetts General Hospital and the UC San Diego where she is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine. She is also the Section Chief of Pulmonary Critical Care at the VA San Diego. She has been studying the health effects of e-cigarettes and vaping since 2013, and this remains the focus of the LCA Lab. Dr. Crotty Alexander also co-directs the first block of the UC San Diego School of Medicine with Dr. Erica Lin.

Lab Members

  • Jorge Masso-Silva, Ph.D.
  • Alexia Perryman, Ph.D.
  • Jacob Bailey, M.D., M.A.
  • Ana Lucia Fuentes, M.D., UCSD Internal Medicine resident
  • Laura Barnes, M.D., UCSD Pulmonary Critical Care fellow
  • Avnee Kumar, M.D.
  • Ankita Mittal, M.D.
  • Erica Lin, M.D.
  • Shrey Patel, M.D.
  • Dominique Roy, M.D.
  • Jarod Olay, M.S., UCLA PhD student
  • Alex Mohenshky, UCI PhD student
  • Ira Advani, Touro University COM medical student
  • Josephine Pham, Rosalind Franklin University medical student
  • Jordan Marganski, UCSD medical student
  • Sanil Gandhi, Boston University medical student
  • Samantha Perera, B.S., UCSD MPH student
  • Kenny Park, B.S.
  • Nikita Kasaraneni, B.S.
  • Howard Chang, B.S.
  • Caitlyn Truong, B.S.
  • Jade McDermott, B.S.
  • Gerald Retonel, B.S.
  • Alex Frounjian, UCSD undergraduate
  • Diego Oliva, UCSD undergraduate
  • Samvel Gaboyan, UCSD undergraduate
  • Ben Ma, UCSD undergraduate
  • Harnoor Sidhu, UCSD undergraduate
  • William Merz, UCSD undergraduate
  • Katarina Nicola, UCSD undergraduate

 

Research Focus

  1. E-cigarette effects on health
  2. Impact of inhalants on bacterial pathogenesis
  3. Role of educational material type and recorded/virtual lectures on knowledge assessment in medical and pharmacy students
  4. Molecular pathways in asthma pathogenesis
  5. Role of neutrophils in acute lung injury

 

Crotty Alexander team

 

Recent Publications

Science

  1. Masso-Silva JA, Moshensky A, Lam MTY, Odish M, Patel A, Xu L, Hansen E, Trescott S, Nguyen C, Kim R, Perofsky K, Perera S, Ma L, Pham J, Rolfsen M, Olay J, Shin J, Dan JM, Abbott R, Ramirez S, Alexander TH, Lin GY, Fuentes AL, Advani I, Gunge D, Pretorius V, Malhotra A, Sun X, Duran J, Hepokoski M, Crotty S, Coufal NG, Meier A and Crotty Alexander LE. Increased peripheral blood neutrophil activation phenotypes and NETosis in critically ill COVID-19 patients: a case series and review of the literature. Clinical Infectious Disease. Accepted on May 7, 2021
  2. Moshensky A, Du M, Shin J, Advani I, Gunge D, Mathew D, Alkolla R, Du A, Javier C, Ma L, Tran A, Nguyen N, Olay J, Nilaad S, Ding J, Najhawan M, Watrous JD, Bojanowski CM, Jain M, Christiani DC, and Crotty Alexander LE. Vaping induced metabolomic signatures in the circulation of mice are driven by device type, e-liquid, exposure duration and sex. European Respiratory Journal Open Research. Accepted on April 24, 2021. PMID: 34262972
  3. Chien J, Hwang JH, Nilaad S, Masso-Silva J, Ahn SJ, McEachern EK, Moshensky A, Byun MK and Crotty Alexander LE. Cigarette Smoke Exposure Promotes Virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Induces Resistance to Neutrophil Killing. Infection and Immunity. 88(11):e00527-20; 2020 Nov. PMID: 32868344
  4. Advani I, Gunge D, Banks S, Mehta S, Park K, Patel M, Malhotra A, and Crotty Alexander LE. Is Increased Sleep Responsible for Reductions in Myocardial Infarction During the COVID-19 Pandemic? American Journal of Cardiology. 131:128-130; 2020 Sep. PMID: 32703526
  5. Corriden R, Moshensky A, Bojanowski CM, Meier A, Chien J, Nelson RK, and Crotty Alexander LE. E-Cigarette Use Increases Susceptibility to Bacterial Infection by Impairment of Human Neutrophil Chemotaxis, Phagocytosis and NET Formation. American Journal of Physiology. 318(1):C205-C214, 2020 Jan. PMID: 31664858

MedEd

  1. Cypro A, McGuire WC, Rolfsen M, Jones N, Shah NG, Cribbs SK, Viren K, Bojanowski CM, Pedraza I, Lynch L, Guzman L, Larsson E and Crotty Alexander LE. An International Virtual COVID-19 Critical Care Training Forum for Healthcare Workers. ATS Scholar. 2(2):278-286, 2021 Jan. PMID: 34409421
  2. Matthew G. Drake, Nirav Shah, May Lee, Anna Brady, Geoffrey R. Connors, Brendan J. Clark, Patricia A. Kritek, Jennifer W. McCallister, Kristin M. Burkart, Isabel Pedraza, Daniel Jamieson, Jennifer L. Ingram, Lauren Lynch, Samir S. Makani, Jennifer Siegel-Gasiewski, Eileen M. Larsson, Edith T. Zemanick, Deborah Liptzin, Ryan Good, and Crotty Alexander LE. Development of a National Academic Boot Camp to Improve Fellowship Readiness. Annals of the American Thoracic Society. V.2(1):49-65; 2021 Mar. PMID: 33870323
  3. Seam N, Richards JB, Kritek PA, Khemasuwan D, McCallister JW, Santhosh L, Prasad B, Bhargava S, Clay AS, and Crotty Alexander LE. Design and Implementation of a Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Medical Education Video Competition: The Best of American Thoracic Society Video Lecture Series. Journal of Graduate Medical Education. 11(5):592-596, 2019 Oct. PMID: 31636831

 

We are actively recruiting e-cigarette users!

Contact us at 858-224-3530 or researchonvaping@gmail.com for more information!