Dr. Tara Carr is a board-certified allergist/immunologist physician and associate professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson with clinical, research, and educational passions. Dr. Carr attended medical school at the University of Virginia, where she became fascinated by the field of allergy & immunology. She completed her internal medicine residency and allergy & immunology fellowship at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, with an emphasis on translational research of airways inflammation and immune dysregulation. She joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 2011, and has since established and leads the Adult Allergy & Immunology Clinic at the Banner – University Medicine North Campus in Tucson. She started the first ACGME-accredited allergy/immunology fellowship program in the state of Arizona, for which she serves as program director, and is passionate about teaching pediatricians and internists the nuance of this specialized field.
Dr. Carr also is currently chair of the UArizona Academy of Medical Education Scholars (AMES) Chapter, past president of the Tucson Asthma Society and past secretary-treasurer of the Arizona Allergy & Asthma Society.
In her research career, Dr. Carr is focused on studying the impact of environmental exposures on development and heterogeneity of allergic disease, with an emphasis on asthma. She has contributed to national collaborative research networks studying novel treatments of asthma for children and adults. Her highly collaborative laboratory at the Bio5 Institute serves as a biorepository for multiple clinical cohorts and utilizes a broad range of experimental methods to describe the immunological characteristics of asthma and allergic disease. As co-principal investigator for the NIAID-sponsored Binational Early Asthma and Microbiome Study, Dr. Carr leads the scientific effort to collect, transport, store and study human and environmental samples from Nogales, Mexico, and Tucson. Her major focus in this study includes describing the immunology of pregnant women and the immunological development of their babies, with a goal of understanding which maternal and environmental factors influence allergic (asthma-prone) and non-allergic immune development.