Highlighting NIH’s Newest Lasker Scholars
IRP Program Enhances Research Capabilities of Talented Doctors
Just like many important scientific breakthroughs require the expertise of scientists specializing in multiple disciplines, developing new medical treatments requires both laboratory-based investigations into the nitty-gritty details of biology and clinical studies involving patients. In recognition of that fact, the IRP’s Lasker Clinical Research Scholars Program provides incredible support and resources to researchers who conduct both types of studies.
Over the past year, two more doctors have joined the prestigious pantheon of Lasker Scholars at NIH: one pursuing treatments for patients struck by potentially lethal infections and the other aiming to head off dangerous skin cancers before they become life-threatening. Read on to learn about the important research they are pursuing with the winds of the Lasker Program at their backs.
Michael Sargen: Setting His Sights on Skin Cancer
For some people, visiting a skin doctor, or dermatologist, is mostly about clearing up unsightly acne or other blemishes. However, Dr. Sargen’s patients have much more serious concerns, as he studies genetic factors that contribute to the risk of developing the skin cancer known as melanoma. While he has been interested in medicine since he was a teenager because he saw it as “a way to help people in my community,” he says, his desire to understand skin cancer didn’t come along until he had begun his medical training.
“During medical school, my interest in cancer care began when a close family member was diagnosed with melanoma,” he recalls. “Thankfully, it was caught early and treated successfully, but the experience showed me just how important early detection can be when it comes to cancer.”
By figuring out how our DNA influences our risk for melanoma, Dr. Sargen hopes to refine guidelines for figuring out which patients would most benefit from frequent exams to look for signs of the disease. Of course, once those patients are identified, doctors need to be able to accurately assess whether a mole on someone’s skin is harmless or could potentially develop into melanoma, and then treat the potentially problematic moles. That’s why Dr. Sargen also investigates the changes that occur in moles before they become cancerous in order to come up with effective early treatments. He is particularly proud of his work on improving melanoma care for children, including his collaboration with other researchers to develop national guidelines for how doctors should diagnose and treat melanoma and other abnormal moles in kids.
“In children, it can be difficult to tell the difference between harmless moles and those that might be cancerous,” Dr. Sargen explains. “Those guidelines are now helping to standardize care across the country and reduce unnecessary surgeries and treatments for children.”
Being selected as a Lasker Scholar was “a tremendous honor, especially given how competitive the program is,” Dr. Sargen says. Though he has been an assistant clinical investigator at NIH since 2021 — and spent three years as an IRP clinical fellow before that — the funding and support provided by the Lasker program will allow him to push his studies of skin cancer further than ever before, to the benefit of many current and future melanoma patients.
“It is a tremendous privilege to be a federal employee and to serve the American public through research that aims to improve health and save lives,” he says.
Fun fact: Ironically, when Dr. Sargen was six years old, he vowed never to follow in the steps of his dermatologist grandfather after his grandfather treated a couple warts on his wrist with liquid nitrogen. “The treatment was incredibly painful, and I remember thinking at the time that I would never become a dermatologist,” he says. “Years later, I completed a dermatology residency and ended up treating hundreds of patients with liquid nitrogen myself. Funny how things come full circle.”
Jeffrey Strich: Investigating Life-Threatening Infections
The conventional stereotype of a scientist’s job is that it is quiet, with days spent sitting on a stool looking into a microscope or standing at a lab bench putting cells and chemicals into test tubes. For Jeffrey Strich, M.D., and his colleagues in the NIH Clinical Center’s Critical Care Department, this could not be further from the truth, as they spend much of their time caring for people who will die within weeks or days without intensive medical intervention. Along with saving lives directly, Dr. Strich and his team are trying to find new ways to help people with life-threatening infections like COVID-19 and bacterial sepsis, in which a massive immune system reaction to an infection begins doing widespread damage to the body’s organs.
“We see a lot of patients in the intensive care unit with infections,” Dr. Strich says. “I feel that this is a place where we can improve outcomes if we can find immunomodulators to treat the dysregulated immune response that these patients suffer from.”
For example, during his time at NIH prior to becoming a Lasker Scholar, Dr. Strich led a study that found a drug called fostamatinib, which inhibits an enzyme called spleen tyrosine kinase, can prevent certain immune cells from responding to a COVID-19 infection by producing substances called ‘neutrophil extracellular traps,’ or NETs for short. Those NETs contribute to inflammation and can lead to a life-threatening slowdown of blood flow in the body when produced in excess. Dr. Strich describes this breakthrough as the “foundation” of his new lab as a Lasker Scholar.
“We learned about this in COVID and are now applying our finding to other infections that cause critical illness, like bacterial sepsis,” he says.
For Dr. Strich, being selected as a Lasker Scholar is the culmination of “a life-long dream to become a physician-scientist with a goal of making novel discoveries that can improve the outcomes of patients,” he says. After spending several years being mentored by more senior colleagues in the NIH Clinical Center, the Lasker program will allow him to set up his very own lab focused on that life-saving research.
Fun fact: Dr. Strich went through medical school at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, which is right across the street from NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. He remains a medical officer in the United States Public Health Services Commissioned Corps.
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This page was last updated on Monday, August 25, 2025