Dr. Patricia Hebda is a professor of Otolaryngology and Pathology and an adjunct professor of Speech and Communication Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also the Director of the Otolaryngology Wound Healing Research Program at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. In addition, she is an associate faculty member of the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative.
Dr. Hebda earned her BS in Biochemistry from Michigan State University. She then achieved her PhD from Ohio State University. She did her post-graduate work at UCLA-Harbor Medical Center Department of Pediatrics before she moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where she continued her work in the Department of Opthomology.
Dr. Hebda is focusing her research on three main areas: wound healing and tissue engineering for applications in the head and neck, which aims to develop new, biologically-driven therapeutic modalities to promote and optimize wound healing of the upper digestive system; pathogenesis of inflammation in otitis media, which focuses upon understanding the molecular signaling associated with mucosal inflammation using animal models of acute otitis media, otitis media with effusion (induced by Eustachian tube obstruction), and chronic suppurative otitis media; and, applications for improving wound care and enhancing healing, which posits that the development of fibrosis can be prevented by blunting early wound-healing events leading to fibroblast recruitment and activation of their synthetic properties.
Dr. Hebda is the Program Leader of the Scarless Wound Healing Research Team, Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) Wake Forest/University of Pittsburgh Consortium. She is also the editor-in-chief of Wound Repair and Regeneration. She is a member of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, the International Tissue Engineering Society, and the Wound Healing Society, the last of which she served as President, 2009-2010.
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CONTACT INFORMATION
Dr. Patricia Hebda
Phone: (412) 692-6217
Email: patricia.hebda@chp.edu