Pitt Pediatrics congratulates Timothy Hand, PhD for his recent funding award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), as part of the NIH. This NIDDK Catalyst Award is a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (DP1) designed to provide significant funding to support high-impact investigator-initiated research, and represents high-level recognition of the innovative accomplishments in Hand’s research. 
Hand is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in our Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Gnotobiotic Animal Core Laboratory, as well as a former scholar in our Richard King Mellon Foundation Institute for Pediatric Research. His lab’s research page can be found here.
Hand’s project plans to take advantage of new technology developed in his lab that allows a further understanding of bacterial activity within the intestine. This ability is far beyond previous understanding of intestinal microbiota which was limited to observing what bacteria were present, rather than their actual activity.
This technology will be applied to a variety of animal models and human patients with intestinal disease to identify shared interactions between host immune cells and bacteria across disease/models that determine how inflammation is induced in the intestine. The goal would eventually be to identify how intestinal bacteria communicate with each other in diseases (such as IBD) that are increasing worldwide. Ultimately, this would lead to identifying drugs to specifically target intestinal bacteria to cure or significantly treat underlying disease.
Join us in congratulating Hand on this amazing accomplishment and ongoing work. And follow Pitt Pediatrics on Bluesky for future updates on faculty research, grants, and awards.