Explore our grantees and awardees

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Millions of people suffer from chronic skin diseases like psoriasis, vitiligo, and alopecia areata, which follow frustrating cycles of treatment, improvement, and relapse. These relapses occur because certain immune cells, called tissue-resident memory T cells, remain hidden in the skin even after symptoms disappear, ready to trigger inflammation again. Christoph Ellebrecht has discovered that these immune cells depend on highly efficient protein production to survive in the challenging, resource-limited skin environment. Christoph Ellebrecht and his team will investigate when and where this protein production efficiency becomes essential for these cells, how it helps them adapt to the skin, and test whether targeting this process can selectively eliminate these cells while preserving normal immune function outside of the skin. This research could lead to new treatments that provide long-lasting remission for chronic inflammatory skin diseases, significantly improving quality of life for millions of patients worldwide.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Valerie Horsley’s project will investigate how lipids and adipocyte-derived molecules suppress fibroblast production of proteins that cause fibrosis. Valerie and her team found that adipocytes release lipids during fibrosis and that this prevents fibrosis development. Their work will identify functional mechanisms that can be targeted for future therapies for skin fibrosis, a debilitating and deadly disorder that lacks any current therapies.

Grant category: LEO Foundation Awards

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Dr. Christoph Ellebrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology and the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania.

He received the prestigious LEO Foundation Award 2025 in Region Americas during the SID annual meeting in San Diego. The award recognizes Dr. Christoph Ellebrecht for his scientific contributions to our understanding of T cell biology in the skin and its diseases.

The LEO Foundation Award – worth USD 100,000 – recognizes outstanding young researchers and scientists from around the world whose work represents an extraordinary contribution to skin research and has the potential to pave the way for new and improved treatments for skin diseases.

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Grant category: Research Networking

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

The Resident and Post Doc Retreat is a conference hosted by the Society for Investigative Dermatology (SID) each year since 2001. The program format provides a protected space in which residents can interact with senior faculty and established investigators for the purpose of fostering attendees’ interest in academic research careers. The program is a combination of formal lectures and presentations, informal discussions, brainstorming sessions and social activities. The retreat is held at the time of the SID annual meeting, which allows attendees to establish connections with each other, and to other meeting attendees. These social networks foster collegiality, collaborations, and appreciation for the creative, multidisciplinary nature of science and other productive interactions.

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Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

To elucidate novel mechanisms that orchestrate skin formation Alexander Marneros have focused on a genetic skin disease that manifests with scalp skin wounds at birth, aplasia cutis congenita (ACC). Alexander and his team found that the genes KCTD1 and KCTD15 are mutated in patients with ACC. These genes form a complex that inhibits the activity of AP-2 transcription factors. Inactivation of these genes in neural crest cells (NCCs), from which the mesenchymal cells of the midline cranial sutures are derived, results in ACC. The data provide evidence that keratinocyte growth factors are secreted by these mesenchymal cells to promote the formation of the overlying epidermis. A key open question is now to understand the precise pathomechanisms that are downstream of this KCTD1/KCTD15 – AP-2 signaling axis, which Alexander and the team will explore in this proposal. These experiments are expected to provide exciting new insights into how skin formation is controlled, which likely has important clinical relevance for multiple skin diseases.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Staphylococcus aureus is the primary cause of skin infections and is a serious public health threat due to the emergence of antimicrobial-resistant strains as well as the failure of all vaccine clinical trials to date. Thus, there is an unmet need for new therapeutic strategies as alternatives to antibiotics and vaccines. Nathan Archer’s proposal aims to solve this problem by interrogating how our immune cells orchestrate protective responses against S. aureus infections. Specifically, Nathan and his team discovered that the amino acid, glutamine, is critical for host defense against S. aureus in the skin. They will use advanced “omics” approaches to understand how glutamine promotes host defense in specific immune cells in the skin using preclinical infection models as well as clinically infected skin. The goal of this study is to identify previously unrecognized immune pathways that can be targeted to augment host immunity against antimicrobial-resistant S. aureus and potentially other skin pathogens.

Grant category: Research Grants in open competition

Year: 2025

Geography: USA

Tiffany Scharschmidts seek to understand how CD4+ T cells adapt to and survive in the skin. These cells are crucial for maintaining skin health but also drive diseases like atopic dermatitis and psoriasis. Despite this, we have much still to learn about the biology of CD4+ T cells residing in skin. To fill this gap, Tiffany and her team will use advanced single-cell techniques to study the metabolism of CD4+ T cells in both mouse and human skin. Preliminary data suggest these cells rely on glycolysis, and they aim to explore this further and identify other important metabolic pathways. In the first part of the study, they will use innovative mouse models and CRISPR-Cas9 technology to pinpoint key metabolic needs and regulators. In the second part, they will extend their findings to human skin, examining CD4+ T cells in both healthy and diseased states. The goal is to uncover how metabolism influences skin immune function, which could lead to new treatments for chronic inflammatory skin diseases.