Maria Virginia Pascual MD

Dr. Virginia Pascual, MD served as the Director of the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children from 1998 to 2004. In 1999, Dr. Pascual joined the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research (BIIR) as an Investigator, and has been the Director of BIIR’s Centers for Inflammation and Genomic Medicine since 2012. Currently, she serves as co-Director of BIIR.

Dr. Pascual is a pediatric rheumatologist with long standing experience in Translational Research and a focus on Human Autoimmunity. She serves as the Principal Investigator of both an NIH-funded Autoimmunity Center of Excellence focused on the study of human lupus and an NIH-funded Human Immunology Program Consortium Center focused on vaccine responses in healthy individuals and patients with autoimmune disease. Dr. Pascual pioneering genomic studies from her laboratory identified the role of dendritic cells and Interferon in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), and of cytokines such as IL1 in children with Systemic onset Juvenile Arthritis, which has led to successful therapeutic interventions, including FDA approval of IL1 blockers to treat this disease. Dr. Pascual’s lab is committed to applying basic immunologic and genomic approaches to the identification of pathogenic mechanisms and biomarkers in human autoimmune diseases.