WORCESTER—Dr. Megan Orzalli, an assistant professor of medicine at UMass Chan Medical School, was chosen for a prestigious $505,000 research grant to investigate how human skin defends itself against viral invaders.
Orzalli is one of just eight scientists across the country to receive a 2025 Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease (PATH) award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a philanthropic foundation that supports early-career biomedical researchers.
The grant supports Orzalli’s innovative research into the immune responses of the skin, particularly against herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), the virus that causes recurring cold sores.
“One of the goals of the PATH award is to facilitate new directions in labs,” Orzalli said in the announcement from UMass Chan. “With this award, we’re going to be able to try some high-risk approaches that might change the direction of what we’re working on, which is very exciting.”
Those high-risk approaches include creating lab-grown, three-dimensional “organoid” models of human skin. These skin-like tissues are designed to closely mimic the real thing, allowing researchers to simulate infections and immune responses in a setting that looks and behaves much like actual human skin.
“The idea is that these organoid models are going to look more like what human skin looks like in real life, and we can simulate virus infections in humans using the skin organoids,” Orzalli said.
Earlier this year, Orzalli also received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study how keratinocytes—the most common type of skin cell—react to HSV-1 and how the virus manipulates those cells to make infection easier.
The work holds promise not only for better understanding herpes infections, but also for uncovering more general principles of how the skin’s immune defenses operate and fail. Orzalli’s lab is part of a growing field exploring how our outermost organ—the skin—serves as both a physical and immunological barrier to disease.
Orzalli, who joined UMass Chan in 2019, is a Seattle native with degrees in microbiology and virology from the University of Washington and Harvard University. She completed postdoctoral research at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The PATH award provides support over five years and is reserved for researchers showing exceptional promise in tackling the root causes and mechanisms of infectious diseases. The Burroughs Wellcome Fund, based in North Carolina, was founded in 1955 and is known for backing bold, high-impact research at critical stages in scientific careers.
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