February 28, 2011 - 11:13pm
Professor Profile: Dr. Alisa Koch
BY NEHA GARG
Q: Where did you go to school?
I attended medical school at Northwestern University Medical Center. It was a six-year honors program.
Q: Why did you decide to come to the University?
I was on the faculty at Northwestern University Medical School. I had an endowed professorship there, but the University of Michigan had a very substantial endowed chair for rheumatology research, and also the strength of the University — especially in my field — was important.
Q: Do you like it here?
I think it’s a very good intellectual environment. The faculty are very strong in most disciplines, so you can usually find people to collaborate with in all the schools.
Q: What are you currently teaching?
I’m an M.D., so the type of things we typically do is teach fellows in rheumatology and residents and medical students in the clinics.
Q: What is your research about?
We study inflammation of rheumatoid arthritis, which is a disease where the body attacks the joints. It’s turning out that inflammation is very important, not just for rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases that are known, but even for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. We also study scleroderma, a disease where there is inflammation first, but then the skin fibroses — meaning it becomes thick and hard, and you can eventually have contractures.
Q: Are there any implications to your research?
In both of those diseases nobody knows the triggers, but we’ve gotten a lot better in recent years in looking at what type of things the cells make. What’s been really gratifying as a scientist is that one can actually see therapies based on biology in one’s lifetime.
Q: What do you plan on doing with the grant you received for your work in scleroderma?
We have a few aims. What we are going to look at is blood vessel growth, which is abnormal in some ways in scleroderma. If you looked at the capillaries, it’s sort of an attempt to make vessels, but the vessels are disordered and deranged. They’re not like they should be. We’re going to study this process.
