Dr. Christie’s career is focused on translational research studies of the risks, pathogenesis, treatment, and outcomes of acute lung injury (ALI) in the transplant and non-transplant human populations. Dr. Christie led efforts to define the syndrome of primary graft dysfunction (PGD) following lung transplantation, and has elucidated the clinical and molecular epidemiology of this syndrome. He developed the definition, validated the definition, and identified the major risk factors for this important form of acute lung injury in the lung transplant population. He subsequently demonstrated the impact of PGD on lung transplantation outcomes, and he discovered novel biological associations characterizing the pathophysiology of this syndrome in humans. Dr. Christie founded the Lung Transplant Outcomes Group (LTOG), a unique multi-centered cohort study of PGD pathogenesis. LTOG translational human studies have demonstrated the role of coagulation/fibrinolysis, upregulation of cell adhesion and platelet activation, and elucidated the role of RAGE in the complex interrelationship of blood transfusion, cardiopulmonary bypass, and PGD risk. In closely related research on trauma-related ALI, Dr. Christie has established the importance of ALI to mortality, refined the ALI definition for use in translational research studies, and identified functional genetic variants associated with ALI risk. More recently, he has applied large scale genotyping methods to identify variation in the ANGTP2 and IL1RN genes as significant ALI risk and led the effort on the first genome-wide association study of ALI in trauma subjects, prioritizing liprin-alpha and other candidates for future ALI mechanistic studies.