Bio
Dr. Steffes, a Wisconsin native, completed medical school and pediatric residency at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She then moved to the Bay Area and completed her clinical fellowship in pediatric pulmonary medicine at Stanford University in 2020. Additionally, Dr. Steffes received further post-doctoral training in the laboratories of Dr. Maya Kumar and Dr. David Cornfield, studying the cellular and molecular mechanism driving pulmonary vascular disease. In addition to her role as an Instructor in Pediatrics in the division of Pulmonary Medicine, Dr. Steffes is also completing an advanced clinical fellowship in Pulmonary Hypertension at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Her clinical work consists of caring for patients with pediatric pulmonary and pulmonary vascular diseases such as pulmonary hypertension, bronchopulmonary dysplasia, interstitial lung disease, respiratory failure, chronic cough and asthma. Her research is focused on the vascular changes seen in pulmonary hypertension, more specifically understanding the cellular characteristics of occlusive neointimal lesions, the abnormal cells that block pulmonary blood flow in pulmonary hypertension. In her most recent work, Dr. Steffes identified a subset of healthy vascular smooth muscle cells that are the cell of origin for the pathologic neointimal cells and a specific signaling pathway, that when blocked, inhibits the formation of neointimal lesions.
Dr. Steffes is currently employing advanced single cell sequencing technologies to further understand neointimal cells with the ultimate goal identifying new therapies for pulmonary hypertension, a fatal disease with no known cure.
