Rebecca Baron Lab

Overview

Dr. Baron is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She serves as the Marshall A. Wolf, MD Distinguished Chair in Medicine and has built a career at the intersection of clinical care, translational science, and physician-scientist training. Her clinical expertise spans acute lung injury, lung transplantation, and sepsis, conditions that remain leading causes of morbidity and mortality in critically ill populations. Her research program is centered on understanding how dysregulated host responses to infection and lung injury lead to lung damage, particularly in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Published work by Dr. Baron highlights how inflammatory pathways disrupt the alveolar-capillary barrier, resulting in hypoxemia, edema, and respiratory failure in sepsis-related ARDS. In parallel, she contributes to advancing precision medicine approaches in ARDS, aiming to move beyond broad clinical syndromes toward biologically defined subtypes that can guide targeted therapies.

Research Projects

Dr. Baron’s laboratory conducts highly translational research that bridges mechanistic biology with clinical application. A central focus is the use of cell culture and animal models to study how mechanical cell stretch, inflammation, and molecular signaling pathways drive lung injury. These studies investigate key mediators such as nitric oxide pathways, inflammatory signaling cascades, and surfactant dysfunction, with the goal of identifying therapeutic targets that can interrupt disease progression in sepsis and ARDS. Complementing this mechanistic work, her group leads human translational studies using large biorepositories of critically ill patients to identify biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Research areas include the role of zinc biology in mediating effects of cell stretch, mitochondrial DNA release in critical illness, inflammasome activation, and metabolomic and lipid signaling pathways in critical illness. The lab also participates in early-phase clinical trials testing novel interventions—such as therapies targeting inflammatory pathways in ARDS—reflecting a commitment to rapidly translating discoveries from bench to bedside. Together, these efforts address precision critical care, with a unifying goal of improving outcomes for patients with severe respiratory failure and sepsis.