Christine Kim Garcia is a physician-scientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Her laboratory focuses on elucidating genetic underpinnings of adult lung disorders. She and her colleagues have used genetic linkage and genomic sequencing to identify variants in genes linked to interstitial lung diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). They have linked rare variants in genes in the telomere pathway (TERT, TERC, PARN, RTEL1), surfactant pathway (SFTPA2), and spindle dynamics (KIF15) to familial pulmonary fibrosis and IPF. Her group has shown that blood leukocyte telomere length is a predictor of survival and disease progression for a broad number of subtypes of pulmonary fibrosis. Together, this body of work has helped better understand the relevance of senescence, proteostasis and cellular replication in lung injury and dysregulated repair.