Dr. Nancy Allen, MD, PhD, is a pulmonary and critical care physician and physician-scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She cares for patients with life-threatening illnesses in the intensive care unit (ICU) and leads a research program investigating why the lung’s response to injury and infection changes with age. By studying how the immune system communicates with the cells of the lung, her laboratory seeks to understand why some individuals recover from lung injury while others develop severe or persistent disease.

 

Dr. Allen graduated with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a Bachelor of Science in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology. She subsequently joined the Medical Scientist Training Program at Yale University, where she earned a PhD in Immunobiology with Distinction and an MD, cum laude. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine and her clinical and research fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. There, she discovered that age-related increases in inflammatory signaling within fibroblasts—structural cells that support the lung—can reshape the lung immune system and increase susceptibility to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a severe form of lung injury that becomes more common with age.

 

Dr. Allen joined Cedars-Sinai in 2026, where her laboratory investigates how aging and environmental exposures, including infection, alter communication between structural and immune cells in the lung. Her work seeks to uncover how these changes influence inflammation, tissue injury, and recovery. Ultimately, her goal is to identify biological pathways that can be targeted to prevent and treat severe lung disease, improving outcomes for patients.