Dr. Joshua Hill, a research associate in Fred Hutch’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division, was awarded the Caroline B. Hall Young Investigator Award at the International HHV-6 & 7 Conference in Boston for his work on HHV-6.
Dr. Hill is active in a number of important projects including the use of a reverse transcription PCR test to identify HHV-6 infections in pulmonary disease and pneumonia after transplantation. He is also working with colleagues to determine the clinical significance of chromosomally integrated HHV-6 in in transplant patients, and developed an efficient screening method to identify a large group of patients with this condition using the Fred Hutch Research Cell Bank.
Professor Michael Boeckh, head of the Infectious Disease Sciences Program at Fred Hutch describes Hill as “a rising star in the field of transplant infectious disease and HHV-6 research.” Hill also collaborates with Professor Danielle Zerr, Division Chief for Pediatric Infectious Disease research at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Keith Jerome.
Hill first came to the University of Washington in 2011 after a residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. During that time, he published a study showing the high incidence of HHV-6 encephalitis in cord blood transplant patients and the paper was selected by the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation’s “Award for Best Clinical Science Article” by a new investigator.
Dr. Hill has exhibited determination and effectiveness in building extensive interdisciplinary collaborations for HHV-6 research. While a resident at Brigham and since joining Fred Hutch, University of Washington he has won a Young Investigator Award from the ASBMT, a pilot grant from the HHV-6 Foundation, and a 5-year highly competitive K23 Career Development Award from the NIAID.
Selected publications by Joshua Hill
- Hill 2012 Cord-blood hematopoietic stem cell transplant confers an increased risk for human herpesvirus-6-associated acute limbic encephalitis: a cohort analysis. Biol Blood Marrow Transplant, PMCID: PMC3816521
- Hill 2014 Hepatitis Due to Human Herpesvirus 6B After Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and a Review of the Literature. Transpl Infect Dis, PMCID: PMC4573554
- Hill 2015 Co-Reactivation of HHV-6 and CMV is Associated with Worse Clinical Outcome in Critically Ill Adults. Crit Care Med 7, 1415-22 (2015). PMCID: PMC4470856
- Hill 2015 Human herpesvirus 6 reactivation and delirium are frequent and associated events after cord blood transplantation. PMCID: PMC4486349
- Hill 2015 Prevalence of Chromosomally Integrated Human Herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) in Patients with HHV-6 Central Nervous System Dysfunction. Biol Blood Marrow Transplant, PMCID: PMC4438705