Julien Cobert

I am an internal medicine doctor currently training at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the last decade, I have grown fascinated with basic science and have been fortunate enough to have been mentored by amazing physician-scientists in Boston, MA and Durham, NC. Initially, my basic science experience was focused on leukemic disease and uncovering molecular pathways that could help in finding new treatments and potentially cures for common cancers. This work was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and primarily was out of the David Scadden laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. I am now hoping to use these basic science tools to pursue new projects in the field of critical care and intensive care unit (ICU) medicine. Currently, I am in the middle of a long stretch of residency/fellowship training in internal medicine, anesthesiology and ICU medicine. I completed my medical school training in North Carolina. My goal is to help chip away at the high mortality (30-40%) of patients who develop septic shock and acute respiratory distress syndrome in the ICU setting. These are some of the most common diseases/syndromes we see in the ICU but little has been shown to actually benefit these patients aside from various mechanical ventilation strategies, antibiotic use and other supportive therapies. Using the molecular biology tools I was fortunate to learn, I would like to use more genetic tools to focus on modifying and targeting immune cells in these disorders. There is so much to uncover and any research that helps us understand the field can potentially help enormously in such deadly diseases.

November 2014