Lucy Luo, a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, has received IFER funding for her project, "Emergence of CXCL9+/CCL13+ monocyte-derived interstitial macrophages and CD8+ T cells leads to chronic dysfunction in lung transplant recipients." Lung transplantation is the only option for over 550 million people suffering from chronic lung disease globally, yet only 54% of recipients survive beyond five years due to complications like chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). Diagnosis is often delayed, and current animal models fail to recapitulate human CLAD, limiting insights into causal pathways. Lucy is developing a powerful new approach to predict lung transplant rejection months before it happens by analyzing patient samples with single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning. By combining molecular and clinical data with time-series modeling across a longitudinal dataset of 921 patients, this project avoids animal use entirely while identifying early biomarkers of rejection and therapeutic targets—setting a precedent for data-driven, ethical, and human-centered research in transplant medicine and other chronic diseases.