Overview
Dr. Palmer leads a successful program of clinical, basic and translational research in lung transplantation, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), bronchiolitis obliterans (BO) and other lung diseases. He directs the Medicine Plus Therapeutic Area at the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) and serves as Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine. He is also the Director of Clinical Research, Duke Transplant Center.
Dr. Palmer has over 250 peer reviewed publications, received numerous awards, including election into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) in 2012, chaired many sessions at national and international meetings, serves regularly on NIH study sections, and is on the editorial board of many prominent journals. He is a dedicated mentor to trainees and junior faculty, having personally mentored over 40 pre-and post-doctoral trainees, many of whom are now engaged in their own successful research careers. He is multiple PI on two Duke R38 awards supporting dedicated resident research, and multiple PI for a Duke Pulmonary T32 training program, all reflecting his deep commitment to support and train the next generation of physician investigators. He has received continuous NIH funding since 2002.
His scientific accomplishments include high impact studies that have demonstrated the importance of innate immunity in transplant rejection, a clinical trial that improved cytomegalovirus (CMV) prevention after lung transplantation, and work that identified rare protein coding exome variants that contribute to the development of IPF. In addition to these studies he has led numerous multicenter studies, registries and clinical trials. His program of translational research focuses on the use of human tissue and samples in studying pulmonary transplant rejection, and the use of human airway cells epithelial cells in the study of bronchiolitis obliterans including in the transplant and occupational setting. Recent work has employed single cell RNAseq to discover novel cell types and mechanisms involved in lung disease and transplant rejection.