Speakers
Keynote Presentations
Dr. Kulkarni is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Molecular Microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine. His laboratory focuses on the role of the complement system in modulating immune responses to acute lung injury. His clinical responsibilities involve caring for critically ill patients and lung transplant recipients. During his postdoctoral training, he demonstrated that airway epithelial cells have unique intracellular stores of the complement protein C3, and these stores can be augmented to mitigate cell death. Since then, his laboratory has developed in vitro and in vivo approaches to test these observations, and has been dissecting the mechanisms by which these intracellular proteins contribute to cell survival. A major focus of their work involves distinguishing the role of locally-derived complement proteins in the lung from those present in the blood, and how they modulate the development and severity of acute lung injury in the setting of pneumonia and lung transplantation.