Message from the Director

As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center, I would like to express my pride in our organization and my gratitude to all who have supported our mission and accomplishments, especially during the past year.

They include:

• Our founding donors, the Weiser family, and subsequent gifts from generous anonymous benefactors to establish the Michigan Food Allergy Research Accelerator (M-FARA) pilot grants, symposium, MFAD and M-SIBS studies and more.
• Our research participants.  Without you, we would not be able to perform the clinical research that leads to a better understanding of food allergies and safer approaches to managing allergic reactions
• Our supporters in the broad University of Michigan community, from our webinar audiences to our newsletter readers, Giving Blueday benefactors and student advocacy groups
• Our talented investigators and their dedicated teams, who are diligently forging new types of biomedical breakthroughs
• Michigan Medicine leadership

It’s been a fast, eventful decade, with game-changers including the Covid pandemic, the FDA approval of the Palforzia and Xolair peanut allergy therapies, the rapid growth of our innovative birth cohort and atopic dermatitis studies and much more. 

On a personal level, the seven years I have been the Director of the Wiser center have been some of the most rewarding of my career, despite the challenges of building a new research center from scratch during the COVID pandemic!

As you will read in the following pages, including our 10-year retrospective timeline, we have much of which to be proud.  I’m excited about the future of our ever-expanding set of research trials, about the biological mysteries being unraveled by our laboratory teams, and about our growing collaborations nationally and internationally. It is remarkable how the profile of the MHWFAC has grown in the food allergy field. 

Looking ahead to our second decade, my intention is that we will make the Center a truly sustainable, preeminent site of food allergy clinical research. We will initiate new initiatives into the pathogenesis of allergic disease and expand our role as a national center for public policy surrounding food allergy. I hope to continue to nurture the next generation of food allergy leaders via mentorship, while recruiting the most promising scientists to U-M. These individuals will form the new leaders for the Center who I expect to be in place over the next few years.