Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS, director of the Asthma Clinical Research Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has dedicated her career to reducing and preventing asthma and allergic diseases.

Originally from St. Louis, she earned her medical degree from Loma Linda University and completed her residency in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in 1997. After a fellowship in immunology at Johns Hopkins University, she joined the faculty in the Division of Immunology and Allergy at Boston Children’s and Harvard Medical School, where she has remained for nearly 2 decades.

Dr. Phipatanakul has built a deep network of community relationships, and she conducts both school- and home-based asthma studies in children and has had continuous NIH funding for nearly 20 years. She leads the NIAID School Inner-City Asthma Intervention Study and the NHLBI Environment Assessment of Sleep in Youth, and overall PI for a NIAID funded, nationwide, multicenter asthma prevention study evaluating omalizumab (anti-IgE) in preventing the atopic march and asthma. Most recently she was awarded a NIAID U01 evaluating whether patients carrying a IL4RαR576gene variant, will have a greater response to dupilumab.

She leads her Center as Pediatric PI in multiple NHLBI asthma and prevention networks, including Precise and has authored over 220 publications in scientific journals, including JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine. She is passionate about successfully mentoring the next generation of investigators, and has received multiple mentoring awards for her efforts. She also enjoys serving the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology and the American Board of Allergy and Immunology in support of her specialty and serving as a role model to others balancing work and family.