Robb Glenny wins Guggenheim fellowship in medicine

Robb Glenny Photo by Carol Dempsey

A UW professor has won the only Guggenheim Fellowship Award given in medicine this year—one of 179 awards to artists, scholars and scientists. Dr. Robb Glenny, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and associate professor of physiology and biophysics, is the recipient.

The prestigious fellowships, to support a year of work proposed by applicants, are awarded on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities. Awards given this year total more than $6 million. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has made fellowship awards since 1925.

Glenny will use his fellowship during a sabbatical year of work at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He plans to investigate the distribution of lung blood flow in humans during increased centrifugal force. He has previously done studies on NASA’s reduced-gravity aircraft.

He came to the UW in 1987 as a senior fellow to work in pulmonary physiology with Dr. Tom Robertson, professor of medicine, after a residency in internal medicine at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina. He earned an M.D. at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. His undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering was earned at Duke, as was a master’s degree in computer science.

Glenny’s research on blood flow distribution in the lung challenges the conventional understanding that gravity is the primary determining factor. The most important insight gained from his work is that distribution of blood flow in the lung can be explained by fractals, a new mathematical science. Using fractal analysis, he has identified fractal patterns of blood distribution and he proposes that this is due to the fractal structure of blood vessels in the lung. These blood vessels form a tree-like structure, constructed from simple recursive rules, that repeats itself from the first to the last branches.

“Fractal systems,” Glenny wrote in his proposal for the fellowship, “provide a unifying mechanism for development and function of vascular trees, and in particular the pulmonary circulation. By providing a geometric framework to describe these apparently irregular patterns, fractal systems capture both the richness of physiological strucutres and their function in a single model.”

Glenny has received several other honors, including the Giles F. Filley Memorial Award in Respiratory Physiology and Medicine, and he is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Applied Physiology. His research is supported by grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. ¶

Claire Dietz