2022 Ehrlich Rising Star, Ivan Jozic, PhD, from Dr. Phillip Frost Department of Dermatology & Cutaneous Surgery, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine gave the annual Ehrlich lecture entitled “Discarded wound dressings- a treasure trove of untapped biomarkers!” at DLS with WHF 2025. Dr. Jozic focuses on understanding the role that specialized lipid rafts, called caveolae, play in various skin diseases, including chronic wounds (diabetic foot ulcers & venous leg ulcers), inflammatory skin diseases (psoriasis & hidradenitis suppurativa), permanent hair loss or scarring alopecia (frontal fibrosing alopecia, lichen planopilaris & central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia) and skin aging.

Dr. Jozic stated: “I am very humbled to be even included in the same sentence as Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who was truly a wound healing luminaire in the wound healing research field and am very thankful to the Wound Healing Foundation for their continual support. I am also really excited at the direction our research is headed in. It is very inspiring to see an idea blossom from bench side in vitro experiments to a potential commercial product that may be used to help people suffering from diabetic wounds that affect as many as 1 out of every 3 people with diabetes.“ 

Congratulations Ivan!



Pictured: 2022 Ehrlich Rising Star, Ivan Jozic, PhD

Mateusz S. Wietecha, DMD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Oral Biology, College of Dentistry, University of Illinois Chicago was awarded the 5^th Annual 2025 Ehrlich Rising Star Award. When asked, Mateusz said "Wound healing is one of the most complex processes in the human body, where many thousands of cells have to communicate with one another across space and time. This tightly controlled intercellular communication is critical for successful repair, but scientists have thus far only been able to observe the healing process in limited snapshots. Our research attempts to study wound healing as a complex, dynamic system of interconnected cellular networks that change in space and in time. We do this work using cutting-edge sequencing tools (genomics) and evolving computational resources (bioinformatics), by integrating published datasets and generating new datasets of wounds that heal with a scar (in healthy skin),wounds that heal faster and with minimal scarring (in oral mucosa), and wounds that heal slowly (in diabetic skin). With this holistic, systems-level comparative approach, we hope to identify key cellular and molecular drivers that control essential aspects of the wound healing cascade, and we hope to identify powerful switches that we can tune to achieve better healing outcomes."

Dr. Wietecha additionally stated: “This award will absolutely help me as an early-career investigator, and it will go far to establish my academic credentials when it comes to applying for tenure. Furthermore, I foresee this award opening doors toward expanding my professional network in the wound healing research and advocacy communities.” 

Congratulations Mateusz! 

Pictured: Mateusz S. Wietecha, DMD, PhD, Ehrlich Rising Star Recipient 2025