This month, we are featuring Hara Levy, MD, MMSc, who was awarded a $375,000 Rosenau Family Research Foundation grant in 2025 for her project titled “Enriching CF Newborn Screening Outcomes through a Precision Personalized Medicine Strategy”, which seeks to elucidate some of the molecular mechanisms that might explain why children diagnosed early through newborn screening (NBS) have such wide variations in susceptibility to respiratory infections, long-term outcomes, and responses to treatment.
Dr. Hara Levy is professor (CHS) in the Division of Pulmonology and Sleep Medicine. She serves as co-director of the American Family Children’s Hospital Pediatric Cystic Fibrosis Center. Levy’s professional activities are influenced by her work as a physician-scientist with a track record of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and sponsored research funding since 2003. Levy has also served as associate director of the Milwaukee Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Center, director of pulmonology research at Lurie Children’s Hospital and Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Northwestern University, and as head of the Pediatric Pulmonary Division at National Jewish Health in Denver.
Levy is a pediatric pulmonologist with an interest in tailoring medical care to individual patients based on their genomic profile. In addition to patient care, she has spearheaded research initiatives focused on understanding the genomic basis of pulmonary disease.
Levy’s research is dedicated to characterizing the relationships among environmental and genetic factors that modify CF lung disease severity and that predict clinical course and therapeutic response. Levy’s recent publications highlight her collaborative strength in the epidemiology of CF, healthcare disparities, and genetics- and genomics-based assays of CF and CF newborn screening.