Rate My Professor Eszter Vladar

Eszter Vladar, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Care at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She earned her BS in Genetics from the University of California, Davis in 2000 and her PhD in Genetics from Stanford University in 2007. Her postdoctoral training at Stanford University focused on centriole assembly in ciliated cells and regulation of ciliary motility by planar cell polarity signaling under the mentorship of Timothy P. Stearns and Jeffrey D. Axelrod. From 2014 to 2017, she served as an Instructor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford. Since 2017, she has been faculty at CU Anschutz as Assistant Professor, recently promoted to Associate Professor, with secondary appointments in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and affiliations with National Jewish Health and the Veterans Affairs Eastern Colorado Health Care System. She is also a Boettcher Investigator.

Dr. Vladar's research investigates the molecular mechanisms underlying airway epithelial homeostasis, with a focus on multiciliated cells critical for mucociliary clearance. She has pioneered studies on ciliogenesis, demonstrating control by Notch and non-canonical Wnt/planar cell polarity signaling, and conducted single-cell RNA sequencing to elucidate ciliated cell states in health and disease. Her lab employs advanced mouse models, primary human and mouse airway epithelial cultures, confocal and electron microscopy, and transcriptomics techniques now widely used in the field. Notable publications include 'Multicilin promotes centriole assembly and ciliogenesis during multiciliate cell differentiation' (Nature Cell Biology, 2012), 'Microtubules enable the planar cell polarity of airway cilia' (Current Biology, 2012), 'Cyclin-dependent kinase control of motile ciliogenesis' (eLife, 2018), and 'Transcriptional analysis of cystic fibrosis airways at single-cell resolution reveals altered epithelial cell states and composition' (Nature Medicine, 2021). Her contributions inform treatments for chronic lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis, COPD, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Awards include the NIH Tumor Biology Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007), A.P. Giannini Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008), Boettcher Foundation Webb-Waring Biomedical Research Award (2018), and University of Colorado School of Medicine Department of Medicine Rising Star Award (2020). She has delivered invited lectures at Gordon Research Conferences and Keystone Symposia.