Heather D. Jones

Biography

Education Medical School: Drexel University College of Medicine, 1998 Residency: Boston Medical Center, 2001 Fellowship: Johns Hopkins Hospital, 2002 Fellowship: National Institute of Health, 2006   Cedars-Sinai Affiliations Department of Biomedical Sciences Department of Medicine Lung Institute (Women's Guild Lung Institute)

Research Interest

Heather Jones, MD, studies acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS. She takes care of many patients with this condition in her clinical work in the intensive care unit. This disease has few or no effective therapies and carries a mortality rate of 30 percent. Because ARDS often develops in the setting of sepsis and mechanical ventilation, Jones and her colleagues developed a mouse model of acute lung injury that mimics these conditions. She is using this model to examine the complex relationship between noninfectious inflammation from mechanical ventilation, the inflammatory response to bacterial infection and the effects of these inflammatory responses on lung function. She is focused on the role of inflammatory cytokines in the development of severe hypoxemia in patients with ARDS. In December 2014, Jones received a K08 grant from the National Institutes of Health to support this work. For this research, she has worked closely with researchers in the Cedars-Sinai Biomedical Imaging Research Institute to develop in vivo lung imaging techniques for measuring ventilation and perfusion abnormalities during acute lung injury in mice. She is collaborating with other innovators in imaging on both small animal and human research projects to apply novel functional lung imaging technology to her research questions