Dr. Coufal is a physician-scientist broadly interested in the application of next generation sequencing (NGS) to critical care through diverse clinical, translational, and basic science approaches. She completed her MD-PhD at the University of California, San Diego in medicine and in neuroscience, undertaking her doctoral work in the lab of Rusty Gage at the Salk Institute investigating the contribution of somatic mosaicism to normal brain development and pathological dysregulation of these pathways in neurodevelopmental disorders. She completed her clinical training and is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric critical care, becoming interested in the contribution of neuroimmunology to both rare and common neurodevelopmental disorders that are currently largely untreatable. Her early faculty collaboration with Christopher Glass mapped the dynamic transcriptome and epigenome of human brain macrophages and generated predictions about regulators, pathways, and mechanisms for the contribution of brain macrophages to neurodegeneration. Her lab works at the intersection between neuroimmunology, pediatric neurocritical care, neurodevelopment and aging.

To understand and model brain macrophage biology, her lab utilizes patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells and genome-wide approaches to identify transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms to model genetic and idiopathic neuro disease in vitro and in vivo. Her work has been published in Science, Nature and Cell. Current questions in the lab query the ontogeny and environmental responses of brain macrophages, and the contribution of neuroimmunology to rare and common neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. She divides her time between clinical pediatric and neurocritical care and translational scientific questions, with an overarching focus on mentorship of diverse physician-scientist trainees at all levels as an associate director of the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) and a nationally NIH Landis Excellence in Mentorship awardee.