Carmen Mikacenic receives Outstanding Investigator award

Dr. Carmen Mikacenic, clinical associate professor (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine) is the recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Investigator Award from the Washington Association of Physicians/Western Society for Clinical Investigation (WAP/WSCI).

This award is one of the most prestigious awards given by these societies and was presented in recognition of Dr. Mikacenic’s outstanding scientific contributions to academic medicine.

She accepted the award and presented “Exploring Alveolar Macrophage Heterogeneity in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome” at the Western Medical Research Conference last week.

Mikacenic is an associate member of the Benaroya Research Institute. Her laboratory studies mucosal immune responses in the lung with the overall goal of finding novel therapies for patients with inflammatory lung diseases.

In particular, her work focuses on injury and repair mechanisms in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). This condition is an inflammatory response of the lung in response to critical illness such as severe trauma, pneumonia, or sepsis. She also studies mucosal immune responses in interstitial lung diseases. These frequently affect patients with autoimmune disease or other inflammatory disease like sarcoidosis.

Her current work focuses on lung macrophage populations and macrophage-T cell interactions that promote repair and fibrosis. She is also using systems immunology approaches to understand host responses to respiratory viral infections, particularly in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.