Research Interests
Dr. Szefler's major contributions are directed toward the appropriate use of long-term control therapy in asthma, including the recognition of variability in response to asthma therapy. He has identified biomarkers and asthma characteristics that can be used to predict and thus individualize asthma therapy. Dr. Szefler is the Director of the Pediatric Asthma Research Program and Research Medical Director in the Breathing Institute of the Pediatric Pulmonary Section at Children's Hospital Colorado. He is also Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine.
He is also a former member of the Expert Panel for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute's National Asthma Education and Prevention Program on "Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Asthma" and a former member of the Global Initiative for Asthma Science Committee. From 1997 through 2018 he served as Deputy Editor for the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. He has published more than 600 scientific articles and co-edited books on severe asthma, childhood asthma and pediatric allergy and immunology and personalized medicine. He is the Co-Principal Investigator for the NHLBI PrecISE Network that is focused on identifying new treatment for severe and exacerbation prone asthma.
He is the Co-Principal Investigator for the NHLBI DECIPHeR Alliance that is designed to reduce health disparities by improving asthma control in disadvantaged children. For the past fifteen years, he has directed a school-based asthma program for the Denver Public School system funded by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment Colorado Cancer, Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Disease Program. This program seeks to define the prevalence and severity of asthma, identify those most significantly affected, and to direct those children to state of the art asthma care. The program was recently awarded a NHLBI UG3 dissemination and implementation grant (DECIPHeR) to assess the feasibility of extending the school-centered asthma program to 5 regional hubs in Colorado.