The Laboratory of Inflammatory Skin Diseases has major focus on atopic dermatitis, also known as eczema, alopecia areata, and other inflammatory skin diseases. The lab has made paradigm-shifting discoveries on the immunologic basis of AD/eczema in humans, opening the door to new therapeutics.  Our lab has developed the only comprehensive molecular maps of AD, defining skin differentiation and immune-circuits characterizing this disease. The lab’s work has established the reversibility of the AD phenotype and defined a series of biomarkers that are now accelerating testing of novel pathway-specific drugs for AD. Our work on atopic dermatitis/eczema has contributed directly to many of the recently developed treatments for this disease, earning us a unique place as one of the leading labs in dermatology and immunology worldwide. We have also shown that Atopic dermatitis is a complex disease with distinct phenotypes based on ethnicity, age and other factors: Atopic dermatitis in Asian and African American patients is different from atopic dermatitis in European American patients, with important therapeutic implications. We are now testing (both clinically and mechanistically) multiple targeted-therapeutics for atopic dermatitis. Our work has also recently extended into studying alopecia areata, in which our findings are also translated to novel therapeutic targets.

Our laboratory runs under the direction of Dr. Emma Guttman-Yassky, the Sol and Clara Kest Professor and Vice Chair for Research at the Department of Dermatology, Professor of Medicine and Clinical Immunology, and Director of the Center for Excellence in Eczema.  She earned her MD from Sackler in Tel-Aviv, and a PhD from Bar-Ilan, Israel. After her Israeli Board certification in dermatology at the Rambam Medical Center at the Technion, Dr. Guttman moved to the U.S. to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship at Laboratory for Investigative Dermatology at The Rockefeller University and a second dermatology residency training at Weill-Cornell, NY.  She is board certified in dermatology both in the US and Israel.

Dr. Guttman has co-founded the international eczema council/IEC, for which she functions as president. This organization now comprises of the vast majority of top experts in atopic dermatitis/eczema worldwide. She is also on the scientific advisory board of the national eczema association. She was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation/ASCI, the American Dermatological Society/ADA, and received the Young Investigator Award (2011) from the AAD, as well as other awards. She has also been elected to serve on the board of the American Skin Association.