Traumatic injuries can affect every person, from car crashes to natural disasters to casualties of war. Trauma is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and while medical technology and better understanding of resuscitation has led to better outcomes for patients, we are now seeing later complications of trauma such as infection that need to be better understood.

How traumatic injuries affect the immune system is an important field of study, since changes in immune function make people more susceptible to infections, which in turn leads to worse outcomes following trauma. Our research is aimed at providing a better basic understanding of how injuries influence the immune system and to use that information to develop therapeutic approaches to help protect injured people from developing infections and other complications.

Our research team has various projects studying trauma, radiation, and radiation combined injury using innovative technology in the hopes of being able to help prevent devastating infection and immunologic dysfunction in injured patients.