The goal of Dr. Taylor’s research program is to understand how to promote positive outcomes in adulthood for individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities and their families. Much of her current work focuses on the transition to adulthood for youth on the autism spectrum. Current projects include: (a) developing and testing a parent advocacy training to improve service access and post-school outcomes as youth on the autism spectrum transition from school-based to adult services: (b) investigating the predictors and consequences of employment stability for autistic young adults; (c) understanding the implications of employment and other day-to-day experiences for mental health and quality of life; (d) investigating the role of language development during the transition to adulthood for youth with fragile X syndrome.

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Dr. Swan's areas of research interest in medical education include professionalism, mentoring, feedback and communication. Incorporating use of simulations and role-play, direct observation, focused faculty development on feedback and mentoring, and establishment of core faculty-resident dyads to lead rotations are examples of how Dr. Swan and her team have creatively incorporated these areas into the curriculum. She has also emphasized resident wellness through empowering and funding a resident-run wellness committee.

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.