David Hill Pioneers Allergy Research for Healthier Childhoods
By Amy Pavlak Laird
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As he navigated the long path toward his M.D./Ph.D., David Hill felt like he was swinging on a pendulum. First, it was two years of medical school coursework. Swing. Then, a few years of graduate school and research in the lab. Swing. Next, clinical rotations, a residency in pediatrics, and a clinical fellowship in allergy and immunology. Swing. Finally, a postdoctoral fellowship.
Hill, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with an undergraduate degree in biological sciences in 2005, said it was challenging to navigate those big transitions between two very different worlds. These days the amplitude of the swing is much smaller.
“Now, I literally think about science and medicine every day,” he said.
Hill is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and a pediatric allergist, immunologist, and attending physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He specializes in diagnosing and treating children with food allergies and asthma, and he is actively researching new diagnostic tools and cutting-edge treatments for children with these conditions.
He spends most of his time in his lab, except for Thursday afternoons, when he sees patients.
“I love seeing new patients and thinking about the diagnostic conundrum that a new patient, an undifferentiated patient, provides,” he said. “I’ll never give that up.”
Beth Jones, a mentor to David Hill, fostering learning and innovation while guiding students in the lab.
When he arrived at Carnegie Mellon, Hill knew he wanted to be a pediatrician. During his very first biology seminar, Professor Elizabeth Jones gave a lecture on genetics — and that interaction shaped the trajectory of his career.
“I was so impressed by her, I went up to her after class and said: Hi, my name is David. I just got here from Seattle. I’m interested in research. Could I come by the lab?”
Jones not only invited him to come by her yeast genetics lab, but she also gave him a job. He started with autoclaving, washing glassware and pouring plates. He was carrying out his own experiments in no time.
“I had the opportunity to practice the practical aspects of science in an incredibly intense way. I felt like a graduate student in Dr. Jones’s lab,” said Hill, who aims to give students in his lab that same type of early exposure to rigorous research.
Hill’s lab tackles research questions related to how diet and metabolism influence the immune system. He’s especially interested in the immune system’s role in pediatric allergy and obesity, including associated conditions like diabetes and asthma. Hill’s research ranges from the very small, like identifying how the immune system recognizes food antigens, to the very large, including epidemiological studies of hundreds of thousands of pediatric allergy patients.
A big research focus is food allergy, including eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), a chronic allergic inflammatory disease that can be triggered by specific foods. The Hill lab was the first to discover EoE as a manifestation of the allergic march, the natural progression of allergic conditions as they develop during childhood. Recently, Hill led a multi-institutional study that identified one of the allergens responsible for EoE. The study was the first to a describe the molecular machinery that mediates food allergen recognition by the immune system in this condition.
“If we understand what’s happening at a molecular level, it will allow us to develop better, more accurate diagnostic tests to find out which foods trigger this disease and ultimately reduce the morbidity associated with EoE,” Hill said.
Hill said he chose allergy as a clinical and research specialty because he saw a tremendous opportunity to positively impact the health of children. And he loves his work — even the arduous path that got him here.
“The M.D./Ph.D. path is a long one, and you live a lot of life during the journey,” Hill said. “I met my wife when I was a graduate student, we bought a house together in Philadelphia and we had two kids. Now I volunteer with the school gardening club. I've been very lucky.”
With Amy Burkert’s unwavering support and guidance, David Hill found his inspiration.