- Professor of Medicine
Livia Casciola-Rosen Ph.D. is a Professor of Medicine. After graduating from the University of Cape Town with a doctoral degree in Medical Biochemistry, she pursued postdoctoral training in Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She initially joined the faculty in the Department of Dermatology at Johns Hopkins, and subsequently became a faculty member in Rheumatology.
Dr. Casciola-Rosen’s research has focused on the shared mechanisms underlying the autoimmune rheumatic diseases, with an emphasis on myositis. In collaboration with Dr. Rosen, she has used disease-specific autoantibodies as innovative probes to define the events that initiate and drive the autoimmune response in the rheumatic diseases.
In addition to overseeing the research laboratory, she directs the Sample Processing and Immunoassay REsearch (SPIRE) Core in the Divisional National Institutes of Health P30-funded Rheumatic Diseases Research Core Center (RDRCC). In this capacity, she oversees a range of bioassays performed by this core and interfaces with investigators and trainees within Rheumatology and beyond. Critical to much of the research performed in the Division of Rheumatology (especially for trainees with clinical-based research interests) is ready access to the RDRCC services and to vast banked cohorts of sera from well-characterized patients. Dr. Casciola-Rosen’s other major role in the Division is to provide research mentorship and career guidance to trainees. In this capacity, for the past year she has co-directed with Dr. Clifton Bingham, the T32 training grant that funds the Fellowship program. Dr. Casciola-Rosen, together with Dr. Ami Shah, co-leads the Precision Medicine Program in Rheumatology. This is a mechanism-focused initiative, using data from prospectively followed patients to define subgroups in the different rheumatic diseases based on distinct phenotypic features, trajectories over time, and mechanism-based measurements.
