Professor Allison Fryer PhD

Dr Fryer earned her MS in Pharmacology from Chelsea College, and PhD with Dr Jenny Maclagan at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, University of London. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, she became faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where she rose to tenured full professor. She joined Oregon Health and Science University in 2003, where she is Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in the School of Medicine. Her major scientific achievements include: discovery of inhibitory M2 receptors on parasympathetic nerves and that a mechanism of airway hyperreactivity, as in asthma, is loss of M2 function. She demonstrated that eosinophil major basic protein is an endogenous antagonist for M2 receptors, and that eosinophils mediate neural plasticity in lung and skin. She developed methods to isolate and maintain parasympathetic nerves in culture and to image and quantify lung nerves in 3 dimensions. Full cv available: orcid.org/0000-0003-1712-9831.