2021 Dickinson W. Richards Memorial Lecturer – Mark Robert Nicolls, MD

Mark Nicolls is an international leader in pulmonary and vascular medicine. He graduated with a B.S. degree from the University of Portland (1987) and an M.D. from Stanford (1993) where he continued for internal medicine training. Working in Dr. Bruce Hall’s laboratory, as regulatory T cells (Tregs) were being characterized, Mark created an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody and began research on immune tolerance. He completed a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellowship at the University of Colorado in 1999 and came onto faculty before returning to Palo Alto in 2007. Dr. Nicolls is a tenured Professor of Medicine and holds The Stanford Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Endowed Chair. Since 2010, he has been the Division Chief of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine and is the Director of Lung Immunology. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (2014) and the Association of American Physicians (2020). His group focuses on vascular inflammation in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), lymphatic disorders and lung transplantation. He holds patents related to this pre-clinical research and helped raise funding for four multi-center clinical trials. Working with Professor Stan Rockson, Mark published the first medical treatment for lymphedema, a condition affecting millions. Next, he led an NIH study testing B cell-depletion therapy for the treatment of systemic sclerosis-associated PAH that showed promising signals for improve exercise tolerance. For this year’s Dickinson W. Richards lecture, Mark will focus on immune dysregulation, inflammation and PAH.