Dr. Amber Luong Celebrates 15 Years of Accomplishment with UTHealth Houston
Rhinologist Amber Luong, MD, PhD, was the first physician recruited to the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston by Martin J. Citardi, MD, after he was appointed professor and chair in 2007. Since then, the department has grown to 18 faculty members representing all the subspecialties within ENT, and Dr. Luong, who joined the department as an assistant professor, is now a full professor with tenure and vice chair for academic affairs.
“In less than a decade, she built a translational otorhinolaryngology research program from the ground up,” says Dr. Citardi, who has served as the medical school’s vice dean for clinical technology since 2019. “We gave her a very big task, starting from literally nothing. Our program has moved beyond basic science and translational science, and currently we are running five clinical trials, the majority of which are industry-sponsored multicenter trials of pharmacologic drugs and devices, in addition to principal investigator-initiated clinical trials. In the past five years, Dr. Luong has elevated our clinical research profile while running a busy tertiary academic practice and actively teaching our residents and fellows.”
As a child growing up in an extended family of physicians, Dr. Luong developed an avid interest in medicine, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s, as an undergraduate biology major at Trinity University in San Antonio that her interest in research blossomed.
“Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which could amplify copies of a piece of DNA across several orders of magnitude, had been developed less than a decade earlier,” Dr. Luong says. “I was a young college student using PCR to generate copies of DNA sequences and studying them. That was a big wow for me.”
She was accepted to the Summer Undergraduate Research Program at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where she worked under two Nobel laureates, Michael S. Brown, MD, and Joseph L. Goldstein, MD. “I thought, here are two physicians who evolved from caring for individual patients to acquiring new knowledge that will help hundreds of patients,” she says. “For the first time I understood that you can design a medical career that combines clinical medicine and basic science research to create a unique perspective as a clinician and a scientist.”
After graduating summa cum laude from Trinity University, Dr. Luong was accepted to the National institutes of Health-sponsored Medical Scientist Training Program at UT Southwestern Medical School, where she earned her MD/PhD. Following an internship in general surgery and residency in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the same institution, she completed fellowship training in rhinology and endoscopic skull base surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. There she met Dr. Citardi, who recruited her to his department at UTHealth Houston in September 2009 as director of research. She rose to the rank of tenured professor with a joint appointment as professor of molecular medicine at the Center of Immunology and Autoimmune Diseases at the UTHealth Houston Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases.
Dr. Luong received the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation Award for distinguished service in 2014; the UTHealth Women Faculty Forum Excellence Award in 2017; the Women in Otolaryngology Helen F. Krause, MD Memorial Trailblazer Award in 2017; the McGovern Medical School Faculty Member of the Year Award for 2017-2018; the American Rhinologic Society Presidential Citation for meritorious service in advancing the cause of diversity and inclusion in 2018; and the Edmund Prince Fowler Award, given by The Triological Society in recognition of excellence in basic science research, in 2019. She was accepted to the 2019-2020 Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine® (ELAM) program, a yearlong, part-time fellowship for women faculty in schools of medicine, dentistry, public health and pharmacy. In 2020, she received the American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery Distinguished Service Award. In 2022, she was the invited Ogura Lecturer for Resident Research Day and the Graduation Ceremony in the Department of Otolaryngology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Luong was named a top doctor at Castle Connolly from 2015 to 2023; among the Best Doctors in America from 2016 to 2023; and has been named among Texas Super Doctors numerous times. She was named to Castle Connolly’s list of Exceptional Women in Medicine in 2018.
She is the worldwide principal investigator for the Sanofi Liberty Aims Trial investigating dupilumab in patients with allergic fungal rhinosinusitis who have recurrent nasal polyps. The trial recently completed enrollment; data capture and analysis will be completed in about a year.
“I’ve been able to build a basic science and translational research program centered on my interests in allergic fungal rhinosinusitis and then extend it to clinical trials. Building a research program in a surgical department is very challenging,” she says. “We’ve had to ask ourselves many questions. How do we encourage surgeons to incorporate clinical research into their academic careers without creating a monetary burden on the department? What support can the institution provide to help cultivate research? When I came here 15 years ago, we were figuring out how to thrive as a department. Now we’re working on developing the academic productivity of our faculty, further expanding our clinical research profile, and continuing to build the department’s research reputation.”