Featured Researcher — Rodney Britt, PhD

Rodney D. Britt Jr., PhD, is a principal investigator in the Center for Perinatal Research at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Britt earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from North Carolina A&T State University and his doctorate degree in Biomedical Sciences from The Ohio State University. He completed his postdoctoral training at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. His research training centered on understanding mechanisms in neonatal and pediatric airway diseases, most notably asthma and bronchopulmonary dysplasia.

Consequentially, patients insensitive to corticosteroids have difficulty managing symptoms and experience greater disease burden. Dr. Britt’s lab studies how airway inflammation affects corticosteroid sensitivity in asthma, while working to develop novel strategies to improve corticosteroid sensitivity and alleviate asthma.

Read on to learn more about Dr. Britt and his research journey.

Why did you pursue a career in research?

Growing up, my mom was a nurse, but I wasn’t too interested in science. I started out in college studying graphic design and communications, but I knew I had the wrong major. I remember watching someone using Photoshop and knew I couldn’t see myself doing that work. I happened to take a physics class and liked it, so I decided I wanted to try science again. I ended up majoring in chemistry over physics, though, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and thought chemistry would be a good general direction in terms of finding a job.

What was your path to your current role?

I took my path one step at a time, and I took advantage of every opportunity in every step. I just went forward in the direction life took me.

Looking back, there’s definitely a lot of serendipity in terms of the interactions I had with the people around me that led me to where I am.

My grad program led me to work with Lynette Rogers, PhD, in her lab. That’s how I got into neonatal and pediatric lung disease — I got really interested in understanding the lung. But if she studied cancer, for example, I’d probably study cancer. The training that I got, and the people that I met and worked with throughout my career had such a big influence on my path.

Then I went to the Mayo Clinic for five years to conduct my postdoctoral research, which is what led me to an interest in asthma. When I got an opportunity to come back to Nationwide Children’s as a principal investigator, it sounded like a great way to continue my research interests. I like the clinical research environment here — throughout grad school, I attended seminars with Neonatology and met physician-scientists in our research group. And doing research at a top children’s hospital creates unique opportunities in basic and translational research. Plus, with the proximity of Nationwide Children’s to The Ohio State University Medical Center, you get the best of both worlds to tackle problems here.

But it was the mentorship from Dr. Rogers and the training environment in her lab I experienced as a grad student that really helped me understand the outstanding research environment we have here. Conducting research in the Rogers Lab is what’s prepared me to apply to grants and continue to be successful. Now, I’ve been National Institutes of Health-funded since grad school. I’ve been able to receive every grant I’ve applied to, and that tells me I’m on the right path. By the time I graduated grad school, I could see this path starting to take shape, but being able to get grant funding reinforced that I should stay on this academic career track.

Life can tell you things. If you can figure out how to be successful, how to do the research, how to keep learning, you’ve found a path to keep following. And when I get a grant, that makes me more competitive for the next one. My K99/R00 grant was really instrumental in me gaining a tenure track position. If you can get opportunities like that, you should take full advantage.

Today, the mentorship relationship I have with Dr. Rogers is still there. Other mentors, like my mentor at the Mayo Clinic, Y.S. Prakash, MD, PhD, have also been instrumental to my research and professional growth. I’ve gotten fortunate to have had really great collaborators and mentors over the years. And I now have my own trainees I’m responsible for, and the experience I’ve had informs how I mentor them.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Even though it can sometimes take two-to-three years to get a paper out or get a grant award, I like the process of developing a hypothesis, testing it and seeing it through. I also like being able to work with other people to solve problems — both people in my lab and collaborators.

How does your research serve our patients and our community?

We aim to advance knowledge of asthma and pediatric lung diseases and infections, which are some of the most common reasons kids are hospitalized. We’ve been doing a lot of basic research up until now, and the impacts of that research may seem more indirect, but improving our understanding of lung disease will help us develop treatments. Our primary goal in our lab is to develop knowledge and make a research platform that can facilitate that. There’s a lot we do know about prematurity and its long-term consequences in the area of lung disease, but as we learn more, we also know it’s an area that could use more research.