Soula Danopoulos, MS, PhD

Dr. Danopoulos is an Investigator at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She earned her Master’s degree from the University of Southern California (USC), where she developed a system by which to characterize mouse lung stem/progenitor cells. She went on to complete her PhD at USC/Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, with a continued focus on developmental lung biology. Her studies explored key developmental signaling pathways (FGF, Wnt, the small Rho GTPase Rac1, etc.), and their role in orchestrating many of the cellular and molecular events that influence lung development, and how they compare/differ between mouse and human. During her postdoctoral training, Dr. Danopoulos concentrated on human lung branching morphogenesis, a process critical to normal lung formation and often disrupted in congenital lung diseases such as pulmonary hypoplasia and bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Over the course of her career, Dr. Danopoulos has developed deep expertise in the molecular and cellular mechanisms of lung development, as well as the mesenchymal-epithelial interactions associated with human lung branching morphogenesis in normal lung development. She has also helped characterize the mesenchymal lineages established within the developing human lung. Currently, Dr. Danopoulos’ research program also aims to investigate the histopathological, molecular and cellular defects observed in developing Trisomy 21 (T21) lungs, and extrapolating these findings to other diseases where hypoplastic lungs are observed.