Jennifer M. Sucre, MD
Specialty
Neonatology
M.D.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 2009
Internship
Pediatric Internship-St. Louis Children's Hospital, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Residency
Pediatric Residency-St. Louis Children's Hospital, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Fellowship
Neonatology Fellowship-UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA
Jennifer Sucre, MD is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Cell and Developmental Biology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She graduated with degrees in creative writing and genetics from the University of Georgia, graduated from Harvard Medical School, trained in pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, and completed fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at UCLA. Since joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2016, she has established a research program focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms of normal lung development and lung disease across the lifespan with a particular focus on bronchopulmonary dysplasia, the leading complication in survivors of preterm birth.
Research Information
Her clinical experience treating premature infants provides a unique perspective for studying lung development, and she has cultivated new ex vivo, in vitro, and in vivo models of lung injury. Dr. Sucre has combined these models with single-cell biology, spatial transcriptomics, and 4-dimensional live imaging to gain paradigm-shifting insights into cellular specialization and dynamics in the developing lung, elucidate age-regulated host susceptibility factors to infection, and define previously unrecognized cell states in chronic respiratory diseases. Her research group integrates cell biology, informatics, and large human datasets with mathematical modeling to study cellular behavior during organogenesis and how early life lung injury disrupts development, with a goal of harnessing the mechanisms of normal lung development to promote lung regeneration after injury across the lifespan.