Dr. Twigg is a Professor of Medicine in the Pulmonary and Critical Care Division at Indiana University.  His research focus has been on pulmonary immune in inflammatory responses, initially in HIV infection.  More recently he has been studying the lung microbiome and virome, exploring how microbiota modify pulmonary immune and inflammatory responses and potentially lead to chronic lung diseases, both in HIV-infected subjects as well as the non HIV-infected aging population.  His work is primarily in human subjects, and over the years he has performed a large number of research bronchoalveolar lavages (BAL) and plasma/serum collections.  This work has allowed him to establish a large lung biobank of well characterized subjects and includes BAL fluid, BAL cells, serum, and peripheral blood cells, many of which are stored in RNA and DNA preservation media to allow future molecular studies.  His lab has performed extensive immunologic and inflammatory mediator analysis on these specimens, both in BAL and in plasma.  This includes cytokine and chemokine analysis, lymphocyte phenotyping, and activation markers.  Dr. Twigg started collecting BALs from post COVID patients early in the pandemic and preliminary results strongly suggest that the inflammatory milieu of the lung after COVID infection can predict certain types of post-COVID chronic lung disease.  Furthermore, he has generated compelling data that SARS-CoV-2 RNA and proteins can persist well after after acute infection and potentially drive the chronic inflammation leading to long COVID syndromes.