UNC's Dr. Sean McLean receives Robert Wood Johnson Foundation award

http://www.physorg.com/wire-news/32100764/uncs-dr-sean-mclean-receives-robert-wood-johnson-foundation-awar.html

Sean E. McLean, MD, has been selected as a 2010-2014 Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program scholar. The Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

McLean, an assistant professor of pediatric surgery in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, is one of only 11 nationwide selected this year to receive the award. Harold Amos scholars are selected based on their academic achievement, their commitment to academic research careers, and their potential to achieve senior rank in academic medicine.

The Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program seeks to increase the number of faculty from historically disadvantaged backgrounds who can achieve senior rank in academic medicine and who will encourage and foster the development of succeeding classes of such physicians.

McLean said he plans to use the $420,000, four-year grant to support a laboratory research project that focuses on how changes in smooth muscle cell phenotypes contribute to pulmonary hypertension, using a mouse model for congenital diaphragmatic hernia. This condition affects approximately 1 out of every 2,500 to 4,000 babies born in the U.S., making it more common than two more widely known congenital disorders, sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis, McLean said.

McLean's UNC mentor for the project is Cam Patterson, MD, MBA, chief of cardiology and director of the UNC McAllister Heart Institute. Administratively the project is jointly housed by the Department of Surgery and McAllister.

A 1998 honors graduate of the UNC School of Medicine, McLean completed a residency in general surgery and a research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis and a residency in pediatric surgery at the University of Michigan before joining the UNC faculty in 2008.

Provided by University of North Carolina School of Medicine