PRIMERO Leadership TEAM
We are a group of doctors and scientists who have been working together for more than two decades to study babies and children with a variety of lung conditions.
Co-PrincipAl Investigator
University of California, San Francisco
Dean Sheppard, MD
Dr. Sheppard has extensive experience in pulmonary and critical care medicine with 40 years of experience leading teams conducting clinical and basic research on asthma and other common lung diseases. He served for 35 years as Director of the Center for Pulmonary Biology and for 13 years as Chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy, and Sleep at the University of California, San Francisco, and has directed 5 large multi-investigator research programs. His laboratory work has led to the development of 5 new drugs currently in clinical trials or advanced preclinical studies for the treatment of asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, and cancer. Dr. Sheppard directs the data coordination center and oversees the multidisciplinary team responsible for designing and conducting all clinical and biological data sharing and analysis.
CO-Principal Investigator & Co-Founder
National Jewish Health
Max Seibold, PhD
Dr. Seibold is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Center for Genes, Environment, and Health at National Jewish Health in Denver. He is Director of the Computational Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Genome Editing programs at NJH. Dr. Seibold leads multiple NIH-funded asthma cohort studies and a longitudinal cohort study of SARS-CoV-2 in children with asthma. Dr. Seibold has pioneered minimally invasive techniques for the collection of nasal airway specimens, combined with cutting edging genomic assays, to allow determination of airway pathobiology in children with asthma. His laboratory has also developed laboratory and computational methods which allow efficient detection of respiratory viruses and the generation of host airway responses, using nasal swabs. He has used these research methods to study asthma in Puerto Rican children for over a decade. These methods and research have helped enabled PRIMERO, a first of its kind study of airway-viral interactions in early life. Dr. Seibold is co-Principal Investigator of the PRIMERO Study, leading his team in the conduct of nasal airway genomic and epidemiologic analyses of the PRIMERO cohort.
Co-Principal investigator & Co-Founder
EL Centro de neumología Pediátrica
José Rodríguez Santana, MD, FAAP, FCCP
Dr. Rodríguez Santana has more than 30 years of experience practicing as a pediatric pulmonologist and intensive care physician. In addition, he has formal training and experience in setting up and managing clinical trials and recruiting subjects. He is the General Director and Director of el Centro de Neumología Pediátrica (“El Centro”), which is part of the largest clinical network for the care of children with respiratory diseases in Puerto Rico. Dr. Rodríguez Santana is also president of the Pediatric Intensive Care Group (“El Groupo”), which consists of 85 pediatricians, pediatric intensivists, and neonatal intensive care physicians covering 8 hospitals. Both companies are dedicated to providing specialized pediatric services, education, and research related to pediatric pulmonary, critical, and neonatal conditions. Dr. Rodríguez Santana's clinical network is the product of more than 25 years of "boots on the ground" effort and forms the backbone of the recruitment infrastructure for this proposal. Dr. Rodríquez-Santana will be responsible for all clinical recruitment and will directly supervise the recruitment efforts for this study.
Co-Principal Investigator (2018-2022) & Co-Founder
University of California, San Francisco
Esteban G. Burchard, MD, MPH
Dr. Burchard conceived and established the UCSF Asthma Collaboratory, assembling a diverse team of multidisciplinary experts, including physicians, pharmacists, scientists, and professionals in various fields. His expertise is in asthma, immunology, inflammation, drug response, and pharmacogenetics, and his focused collaborative and community efforts realized the establishment of a comprehensive clinical database and biorepository housing data from 16,000 Puerto Rican, African American, and Mexican American children with and without asthma. Dr. Burchard's 25 years of work in Puerto Rico generated the preliminary data and established the infrastructure that laid the foundation for PRIMERO.
Lead Epidemiologist (2018-2021)
University of California, San Francisco
Sam Oh, PhD, MPH
As PRIMERO's Director of Epidemiology, Dr. Oh's responsibilities include study design and management. His strong background in epidemiology (including trials, intervention, cardiovascular health, cancer, asthma, and health disparities), and his training in genetic and molecular epidemiology with specific expertise in assessing gene-environment interactions and genetic analysis in racial/ethnic minority populations provide a solid foundation for the project.
