Collaborative Care for CRSwNP Expert and Patient Insights

Faculty

Katie Buchheit, MD

Assistant Program Director, Allergy/Immunology Fellowship,
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Katie Buchheit completed her medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY, her residency in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and her Allergy/Immunology fellowship at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts.

During fellowship, she performed her research training in the laboratory of Drs. Tanya Laidlaw and Joshua Boyce, where she focused on the pathogenesis of nasal polyposis and aspirin-exacerbated respiratory disease (AERD). She is now the Assistant Director of the AERD Center at BWH. Her research continues to be focused on understanding AERD and nasal polyposis, and she is dedicated to investigating the causative mechanisms and exploring new treatments for these diseases. She is PI of an NIH-funded study investigating the role of macrophage-mediated inflammation in AERD and mechanistic factors associated with nasal polyp recurrence. Clinically, she focuses her practice primarily on the treatment of patients with chronic rhinosinusitis and AERD.

Stella Lee, MD

Chief of Rhinology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Stella Lee is a leading expert in Rhinology, serving as the Chief of Rhinology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. As a clinician-scientist, she focuses on developing innovative management strategies for patients with inflammatory upper airway diseases and spearheads the advancement of therapeutics for airway inflammation.

Prior to her tenure at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Lee was the Division Chief for Sinonasal Disorders and Allergy in the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center for a decade. Her research explores inflammatory endotypes of chronic rhinosinusitis, the effects of environmental pollution on airway inflammation, and the development of novel approaches for chronic inflammation, bridging basic science with translational medicine.

Dr. Lee is recognized for her leadership in investigating targeted therapeutics and establishing new paradigms for understanding and treating upper airway disorders. Her work is at the forefront of both clinical care and scientific discovery in the field of Rhinology.

Michael Wechsler, MD, MMSc

Professor of Medicine, National Jewish Health
Director, NJH Cohen Family Asthma Institute
Associate Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations
in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, National Jewish Health, Denver, CO, USA

Michael E. Wechsler is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at NJH in Denver, Director of the National Jewish Health (NJH)/Cohen Family Asthma Institute and Associate Vice President for Innovation and Industry Relations at NJH. In addition to clinical work in pulmonary & critical care medicine, Professor Wechsler’s research focuses on clinical and translational asthma with emphasis on clinical trials in asthma, novel asthma therapies, bronchial thermoplasty, asthma pharmacogenomics, and management of eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (i.e. Churg-Strauss Syndrome, CSS). He has led studies focusing on novel biologic agents for asthma and related diseases, including benralizumab, dupilumab, mepolizumab, reslizumab, tezepelumab and depemokimab. He has published more than 350 publications relating to asthma, EGPA and eosinophilic lung diseases, and has been an investigator in over 60 clinical trials. He was a member of the Steering Committee and site Principal Investigator of the NIH-sponsored Asthma Clinical Research Network (ACRN/AsthmaNet), a multicenter asthma clinical trials consortium, and currently serves as the PI of the Denver site of the Precision Intervention in Severe/Exacerbating Asthma (PRECISE) network. A member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, he has participated in many different task forces related to the study of eosinophilic lung diseases that were sponsored by the NIH, the FDA, the European Respiratory Society and the International Eosinophil Society. He is currently Associate Editor of the journal Chest and has served as Associate Editor of the journal Allergy and on the editorial board of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Dr. Wechsler received AB and MMSc degrees from Harvard University in Boston and an MD degree from McGill University in Montreal. He completed medical training at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and as part of the Harvard Combined Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship Training Program.