Dr. Lynn M. Schnapp is the George R. and Elaine Love Professor and chair of the Department of Medicine. She is a faculty member in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and a graduate fellow of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program for Women.
Dr. Schnapp is a fellow and immediate past president of the American Thoracic Society, where she has held numerous leadership positions, and a recipient of its Elizabeth Rich Award for outstanding scientific, leadership and mentorship contributions in pulmonary medicine. She is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society and the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Advisory Council (NIH/NHLBI).
She is recognized for her long-standing commitment to mentorship, career development and increasing the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in medicine. She has been an active mentor in programs that support the participation of underrepresented minority students, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Minority Access for Research Careers (MARC) Program and the NIH/NHLBI Stipends for Training Aspiring Researchers (STAR) Program.
Dr. Schnapp is an established NIH-funded investigator in cell and molecular biology with clinical and research expertise in lung injury and repair. Her research examines matrix remodeling in the normal and injured lung and the role of lung pericytes and other stromal cells in the pathogenesis of fibrosis.
Dr. Schnapp’s clinical interests include Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and critical care medicine.
View Dr. Lynn M. Schnapp’s publications on NCBI My Bibliography
Dr. Schnapp’s research broadly focuses on the processes that govern acute lung injury and its resolution. More specifically, she investigates how scar tissue forms during lung injury and diseases that damage lung function, such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Using unique mouse models to identify cells and pathways that may be potential targets for lung injury, Dr. Schnapp’s research incorporates state-of-the-art computational and pathway-focused network analysis to lung proteomics and transcriptomics data in order to identify novel pathways involved in lung diseases such as ARDS, sarcoidosis, and ventilator associated pneumonia.
More recently, her work has focused on the origin of lung myofibroblasts, and performed key fate mapping experiments demonstrating the importance of pericytes as myofibroblast progenitors in the lung. Her ongoing work is focused on understanding the roles of pericytes in the immune response and fibrotic response in the lung.