Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Wanda Phipatanakul, MD, MS, director of the Division of Immunology Research Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and S. Jean Emans 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 over 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 23 years. She leads the NIAID School Inner-City Asthma Intervention Study, the NHLBI Environment Assessment of Sleep in Youth, the NIAID funded, PARK study https://parkstudy.org evaluating omalizumab (anti-IgE) in preventing the atopic march and asthma https://answers.childrenshospital.org/asthma-prevention-xolair/ , and a NIAID IDEA study https://ideaasthma.org evaluating whether patients carrying a IL4RaR576gene variant, will have a greater response to dupilumab. She leads her Center as Pediatric PI in multiple NHLBI asthma and prevention networks, including the Severe Asthma Research Program, the Precise Severe Asthma Network, the Atopic Dermatitis Research Network, and the Childhood Asthma in Urban Settings Network. She has authored >350 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 (AAAAI) and the American Board of Allergy and Immunology serving on both organizations’ Board of Directors. She also serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Allergy Clinical Immunology (JACI) and currently on the Editorial Board for several other journals including JACI in Practice and Chest. She is passionate about serving as a role model and supportive mentor to others balancing work and family.