ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023
The ASCI is pleased to recognize the 25 recipients of its 2023 Emerging-Generation Awards:
Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Infectious diseases are leading causes of global morbidity and mortality, yet the antimicrobial pipeline is diminishing sharply, making it imperative that we develop new approaches for treatment. The manifestation and clinical course of infections occurs due to the intersection of multiple host and pathogen factors, but in most clinical settings, there is an overwhelming focus on pathogens, with limited granular queries of the immune response. Pierre Ankomah, MD, PhD believes this is a crucial frontier for infectious diseases; detailed characterization of immune responses to understand their variation between individuals and patient groups, over time, and in response to different microbial stimuli will open new avenues for management of infections, including selection of immunomodulatory strategies.
Dr. Ankomah received graduate training as a microbial population biologist, developing and parameterizing mathematical models that evaluated the contribution of antibiotic pharmacodynamics, immune cidal activity and bacterial physiological states to the clearance of infections from S. aureus, E. coli, and mycobacteria. In his post-doctoral work, he is using transcriptional analysis of immune cells at single-cell resolution (scRNA-seq) to study the immunological heterogeneity underlying sepsis. Gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria differ in pathogen-mediated damage and immune-response pathway activation, yet there is limited understanding of the mechanistic differences in sepsis caused by these groups of organisms. ScRNA-seq studies in our laboratory have uncovered a novel monocyte subpopulation (MS1) enriched in sepsis. Dr. Ankomah is analyzing immune cells from gram-negative and gram-positive sepsis to investigate differences in MS1 quantity and kinetics, gene and protein expression, and modulatory activity on other immune cells. The project provides rigorous training in next generation genomics and quantitative immunology and is equipping him with tools to develop a research program pursuing investigations at the intersection of host and microbial biology. Ultimately, Dr. Ankomah hopes to inform a new approach to infectious diseases where immunological considerations become as routine as pathogen-based ones.
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
As a child neurologist, Mariko L. Bennett, MD, PhD cares for children with acquired and genetic neuroimmunological conditions. Her esearch focuses on understanding what microglia - the resident macrophages of the brain and spinal cord - do during development and in disease. During her MD/PhD at Stanford, Dr. Bennett defined the transcriptional identity of microglia and the dual contribution of the brain environment and unique developmental origin of microglia. She also co-invented a method to replace microglia with healthy surrogates, with the hope of developing new cell therapies for otherwise untreatable pediatric neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Bennett joined the Song-Ming lab at Penn where she has continued this work and more recently become interested in how microglia contribute to brain antiviral immunity and genetic interferonpathies.
Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Seth Michael Bloom, MD, PhD is an infectious diseases physician-scientist and Instructor in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He studies how the cervicovaginal microbiome and metabolome influence genital tract health, immunity, and risk for diseases such as HIV and bacterial vaginosis. He seeks to identify new therapies to modify microbiota composition. This research is broadly relevant for genital tract health but holds particular importance for southern and eastern African populations, where the burden of microbiota-associated diseases is highest.
Dr. Bloom grew up in rural western Montana, where he spent summers conducting bacteriology research at Rocky Mountain Laboratories. He received his BA in Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, where his undergraduate thesis examined influenza A virus. Dr. Bloom earned MD and PhD degrees at Washington University School of Medicine, researching the roles of intestinal bacteria in a mouse model of inflammatory bowel disease and intestinal immune responses. As a medical student, he also took classes in community health with medical students at the University of Nairobi College of Health Sciences in Kenya. Dr. Bloom completed residency training in Internal Medicine in the Physician Scientist Training Program at Washington University / Barnes Jewish Hospital, where he was a Global Health Scholar and trained in Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia. He completed Infectious Diseases fellowship in the combined Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital program. Dr. Bloom currently conducts research at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard with Dr. Douglas Kwon, working closely with colleagues in South Africa.
Dr. Bloom is also committed to scientific mentorship, serving as board member of an NGO that provides mentorship for students at diverse African medical schools including an annual research symposium, virtual Work-in-Progress sessions, and a Scholars Program pairing students with mentors in their areas of interest.
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Fabian Maximilian Bock, MD, PhD recently completed a clinical nephrology fellowship, a T32-funded research period, and is currently an Instructor funded by the American Society of Nephrology Ben J. Lipps fellowship. During an active PhD research phase in medical school, Dr. Bock developed expertise in renal epithelial cell culture models, mouse kidney phenotyping, and various molecular biology techniques to assess the mechanistic role of target proteins focusing on coagulation and inflammation in diabetic nephropathy (first or co-first author publications in PNAS, JASN, Kidney International, Scientific Reports and co-authorships in Blood, Nature Communications, Communications Biology). While completing internal medicine residency and clinical nephrology fellowship in Vanderbilt’s Physician Scientist Training program, he noticed that the clinical tools to combat kidney disease are very limited and translational efforts largely focus on limiting fibrosis and inflammation. This is because there is poor understanding of the fundamental principles that hold the renal epithelium together. This led Dr. Bock to seek out basic mechanisms of how the kidney epithelium forms and functions and joined Roy Zent’s lab who is an expert on integrin signaling in kidney development. Dr. Bock has focused on studying the integrin downstream target Rac1, a small Rho GTPase and a key molecular switch controlling actin cytoskeletal organization. They have discovered novel aspects of Rac1 in promoting renal epithelial integrity, morphology, and cytoskeletal stability (Bock et al. J Cell Biol, 2021) and Dr. Bock currently studies its role in kidney epithelial repair. Using advanced imaging approaches, he has found that Rac1 is required for the complex actin-dependent morphological transformations of cell division in a repairing kidney tubular epithelium. With this work, Dr. Bock recently won the ‘’Best Oral Presentation’’ and “People’s Choice” Awards at the ASN Basic Research Forum 2022. He is also an Attending Physician at the Nashville VA on their dialysis and renal consult services.
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Nicholas Borcherding, MD, PhD, MS seeks to become a physician-scientist, researching and focusing his clinical efforts on developing and modulating the tumor microenvironment. More broadly, his general interest is in the interface of computational immunology and cancer biology, taking research from the processor to the patient. As an MD/PhD student with Dr. Weizhou Zhang, Dr. Borcherding's work centered around the characterization of microenvironment heterogeneity in renal clear cell carcinoma using single-cell sequencing. Specifically, this work, supported by the F30 CA206255 grant and an American Medical Association Seed Grant, characterized a novel subset of highly suppressive tumor-infiltrating regulatory T cells across multiple cancers with prognostic and therapeutic applications. This effort led to a co-first author publication in Nature Communications, in addition to publications resulting from developing tools for single-cell analysis, including the first immune repertoire analysis pipeline for single-cell sequencing and single-cell-specific gene set enrichment analysis. After Dr. Borcherding's thesis defense and during his clinical years of medical school, he became involved in aberrant T cell transcriptional states in skin diseases, such as cutaneous T cell lymphoma and alopecia areata. These investigations resulted in an adjunct research appointment in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Iowa, which he still maintains, and multiple first-author publications in JCI Insight, Clinical Cancer Research, and Blood Advances. During his residency, Dr. Borcherding joined the laboratories of Drs. Jonathan Brestoff and David DeNardo to study the intercellular mitochondria transfer in adipose tissue and pancreatic malignancies. Although early in his post-doctoral studies, he led investigations into tissue- and diet-specific alterations in adipocyte-derived mitochondria transfer which led to a recent publication in Cell Metabolism. Dr. Borcherding's research goal is to extend the ability to track intercellular mitochondria by leveraging single-cell sequencing modalities, moving beyond fluorescent tags, and opening the field to wider investigations of human pathophysiology and possible therapeutic manipulation.
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Matthew R. Brier, MD, PhD received his BS in neurosciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. During his undergraduate training he worked in a behavioral neuroscience lab under the direction of Dr. John Hart. During this time, he developed his interest in clinical neurology and learned the importance of basing research questions on clinical needs. He then completed both his MD and PhD training at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL) as a part of the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). His PhD mentor was Dr. Beau Ances, together they studied changes in brain structure and function during pre-clinical Alzheimer disease where pathology and dysfunction accumulate but no clinical symptoms are observed. Dr. Brier stayed at WUSL for his Adult Neurology Residency and served as Administrative Chief Resident during his PGY4 year. Subsequently, he completed a hybrid junior faculty and multiple sclerosis fellowship year and was promoted to Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology. Dr. Brier’s work focuses on using magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography to better understand MS through improved disease severity prediction and characterization of biological processes that lead to progressive disability in multiple sclerosis. Dr. Brier's work combines clinical observation with state-of-the-art neuroimaging to try to improve the quality of life of people living with multiple sclerosis. He is an author on over 40 peer-reviewed publications, is frequently invited to present his work at national and international meetings, and has received several awards for his work.
Emory University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Andres Chang, MD, PhD is originally from Guatemala and developed his interest in becoming a physician-scientist after he was introduced to biomedical research as an undergraduate student. To accomplish this goal, Dr. Chang enrolled in the MD/PhD program at the University of Kentucky, where he performed his graduate studies under the mentorship of Dr. Rebecca Dutch looking at aspects of viral-cell attachment and membrane fusion. Through his clinical training, Dr. Chang became ever more interested in studying the immune system of patients with lymphoid malignancies as he finds the complexities introduced by the presence of a lymphoid cancer and the treatments against these cancers on an already complex physiological system extremely fascinating. Thus, Dr. Chang's goal is to be a physician-scientist with an independently-funded laboratory studying immune responses in patients with lymphomas. This led him to pursue further training in Hematology and Medical Oncology and in Human Immunology at Emory University, where he is being mentored by experts in immunology and lymphoma, Drs. Rafi Ahmed and Jonathon Cohen, respectively. Dr. Chang has been working with his mentors to gain the skills and knowledge in human immunology that will be necessary to conduct his own independent research. Dr. Chang's research has thus far allowed him to characterize the antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in patients with lymphoma and other cancers. He has also characterized the herpes-specific immune response in a CLL patient with herpes simplex lymphadenitis. Dr. Chang anticipates that the knowledge generated through his research could be applied to develop strategies to strengthen the immune responses in these patients, decreasing the morbidity and mortality due to infections and also improving cancer immunotherapies.
Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
John Yongjoon Choi, MD is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a transplant nephrologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He completed his medical training at SUNY Upstate Medical University in 2014 followed by an internal medicine residency at the University of Rochester, NY. In 2017, he joined the Brigham and Women's Hospital / Massachusetts General Hospital Joint nephrology fellowship, and upon completion, he further pursued additional training in kidney transplantation to become a UNOS-certified transplant nephrologist.
Dr. Choi received the NIH T32 training Award to study transplant immunology under Dr. Jamil Azzi at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dr. Harvey Cantor at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Upon completion of T32 award, he continued additional postdoctoral training with the support from the American Society of Transplantation Basic Research Fellowship. Dr. Choi has published over 12 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals like PNAS, Science Translational Medicine, and Scientific Reports, and his research has been presented at multiple national society meetings. His current research activity is supported by the American Society of Nephrology. Dr. Choi's research focuses on developing novel tolerogenic therapeutics using antigen-specific regulatory T cells.
Duke University Medical Center
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Jashalynn German, MD is a current third year fellow in the Duke University Medical Center’s Fellowship Program in the division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism. She is on the fellowship’s health services research track, supported by the division’s T32 grant. As a health services researcher, with a special interest in health equity, Dr. German's research focuses on understanding patient access and utilization of health care systems and health outcomes with the overarching goal of decreasing health disparities related to endocrine diseases by identifying modifiable barriers to health equity at patient, provider, and system-levels. Her primary research goals are to develop and effectively implement practical interventions, through health services and behavioral initiatives. Dr. German has specific training and expertise in health services research with an emphasis in health equity. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with other researchers and produced several peer-reviewed publications showcasing the findings of our projects. In the Spring of 2023, Dr. German will be transitioning onto faculty at Duke University as an Assistant Professor in the department of Medicine, division of Endocrinology.
Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Emily B. Heikamp, MD, PhD, MSc is a physician-scientist and Instructor in Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where her clinical and research interests focus on patients with hematologic malignancies. Her research aims to elucidate the mechanisms of epigenetic dysregulation by oncogenic fusion proteins in leukemia. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Heikamp's goal is to translate her research discoveries into targeted, epigenetic therapies for patients with relapsed or refractory leukemia.
For the past three years, Dr. Heikamp has been working with Dr. Scott Armstrong at Dana-Farber to understand how oncogenic fusion proteins drive epigenetic dysregulation in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Specifically, she is studying AML driven by chromosomal translocations involving the Nucleoporin 98 (NUP98) gene, which produce oncogenic NUP98 fusion proteins (NUP98-fp). Patients with NUP98-fp AML have an extremely poor prognosis. Dr. Heikamp's work on NUP98-fp AML has revealed a novel drug target that is being rapidly translated into ongoing clinical trials. Her research revealed a novel molecular dependency on the mixed-lineage leukemia 1 (MLL1, also known as KMT2A) histone methyltransferase and Menin chromatin complex in NUP98-fp AML. Since small molecule inhibitors of the MLL1-Menin interaction are already in early phase clinical trials, Dr. Heikamp's work provided pre-clinical justification for including NUP98-fp patients, a group in desperate need of targeted therapies, in these trials.
Dr. Heikamp's goal is to become an independent investigator in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, focusing on the study of oncogenic fusion proteins in hematologic malignancies. As a physician scientist, 80% of her time is dedicated to research, and 20% of her time is devoted to patient care. As she transitions to become the independent leader of her own laboratory, she will continue my work on NUP98-fusion proteins, though will expand her focus to study additional oncogenic fusion proteins as her career advances and her interests broaden.
Mass General Brigham
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Annie Hsieh, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist in the field of Neuro-Oncology and is currently a Neuro-Oncology fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Center. She obtained her MD from the Tzu Chi University in Taiwan and her PhD in Pathobiology from Johns Hopkins University under the mentorship of Dr. Chi V. Dang. During her PhD, Dr. Hsieh co-discovered that the MYC oncogene could disrupt the circadian molecular clock, contributing to aberrant metabolism and cell growth, which was published in Cell Metabolism. Her work opened the field of oncogenic-regulation of molecular clock and was highlighted in top journals including Nature Review of Cancer and Molecular Cell. She also initiated a collaboration with neuroscientist Dr. Amita Sehgal that led to her discovery that both upregulation and downregulation of Drosophila Myc affect circadian behavior in fruit flies which was published in Cell Report. Subsequently, she completed her Neurology residency at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, where she organized the first Neuro-Oncology tumor board.
During her Neuro-Oncology fellowship, in addition to taking care of brain tumor patients, Dr. Hsieh is conducting her post-doctoral research in the laboratories of Drs. Bernardo Sabatini and Marcia Haigis at the Harvard Medical School with support from the National Cancer Institute K12 program. Her research focuses on utilizing unbiased CRISPR screen to identify novel metabolic regulators for glioma growth and investigating the metabolic regulations at the neuron-glioma synapses. Dr. Hsieh’s goal is to have her own laboratory in the future to investigate how glioma takes advantage of the brain microenvironment and hijacks the metabolic pathways originally wired to produce neurotransmitters at the synapse.
Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
As a translational medical oncologist, Albert Eusik Kim, MD seeks to apply cancer biology and machine learning towards designing personalized, precision-based treatment paradigms for patients. As a trainee, Dr. Kim used functional imaging and tumor genomics in patients with brain metastases to identify predictive biomarkers of checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) response and resistance. Additionally, he oversees several single-cell profiling efforts to assess tumor microenvironmental influences for ICI intracranial response. Thus far, they have identified differential patterns of vascular remodeling and T cell phenotypes associated with ICI response/resistance. He also co-led the analysis of two phase II trials (Nature Cancer 2021, Nature Communications 2022). Now, as junior faculty, he is complementing his skillsets in Omics and clinical trial analysis with training in machine learning (ML) as another tool to study tumor biology. Dr. Kim’s long-term vision is to lead a translational multi-disciplinary group applying machine learning and Omics towards pre-clinical and clinical oncology questions.
Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
When Elise Liu, MD was in medical school, her child was diagnosed with a peanut allergy, which sparked her interest in food allergy. She was surprised to learn that despite the prevalence and impact of food allergy, the pathogenesis is not completely understood, treatment options are limited, and there is no cure. During her internal medicine residency, clinical and lab rotations cemented her desire to apply to allergy and immunology fellowships.
During second year of fellowship in 2018, Dr. Liu joined Dr. Stephanie Eisenbarth’s lab to study the role of immunoglobulin A (IgA) in food allergy. She quickly realized that to maximize my potential to make an impact, she needed more rigorous training in laboratory research and immunology. Therefore, she enrolled in the Yale Investigative Medicine PhD program, which involved classes and continued work in lab. Dr. Liu just published a first-author manuscript on the patterns of human gut peanut IgA in food allergy. She has defended and submitted her dissertation, and is slated to graduate from her PhD program in December 2022.
In July of this year, Dr. Liu was appointed as an Instructor and Associate Research Scientist. She continues to spend 80% of her time in the lab under the mentorship of Dr. Eisenbarth, working on finding the signals that trigger food-specific IgA to be made in mice. Dr. Liu's goal is to become an independently funded physician-scientist studying the mechanisms of food allergy and tolerance.
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Mona Mashayekhi, MD, PhD first experienced research as an undergraduate, where she spent three years in Dr. Marisa Alegre's basic immunology laboratory at the University of Chicago studying T cell activation in the context of transplantation. During her MD/PhD training at Washington University in St Louis, Dr. Mashayekhi joined Dr. Kenneth Murphy’s lab and expanded her immunology expertise by investigating the transcriptional control of dendritic cell development and learning advanced techniques in cellular and molecular biology. She was productive during her undergraduate and graduate years, contributing to 13 manuscripts including a co-first author in PNAS, a first author in Immunity, and significant contributions to a manuscript in Nature. She also received a Howard Hughes Summer Fellowship in 2003 and an AHA Predoctoral Fellowship in 2010.
During her clinical training at Vanderbilt, Dr. Mashayekhi was intrigued by studies showing that obesity-induced chronic inflammation plays a role in cardiometabolic disorders. She merged her immunology background with these clinical interests to develop a research area in the multidisciplinary field of immunometabolism. As a mouse immunologist with seven years of molecular and cellular basic science experience, she was driven during her fellowship to extend her research to humans. Dr. Mashayekhi joined the lab of Dr. Nancy Brown who is an expert in hypothesis-driven human studies. She worked to develop new skills in patient-based discovery research and human immunology to complement her prior experiences. She has contributed to sixteen manuscripts: fourteen published including three first-author, and two submitted or in revision. Her research was selected for an oral presentation at the annual Endocrine Society conference in 2019, and she received an NIH Loan Repayment Program award and an Endocrine Fellows Foundation grant. Dr. Mashayekhi also received the Vanderbilt Faculty Research Scholars career development award for this work in July 2020.
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Johannes C. Melms, MD, was born and raised in Tübingen, Germany. He received his medical degree and a research doctoral degree in Translational Medicine from Technische Universität München. During medical school he was supported by the German Academic Scholarship foundation, which enabled additional research training and international exchange with academic institutions in the United States. In 2017, Dr. Melms joined a multi-institutional effort led by Dr. Benjamin Izar at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to study cancer immune evasion in melanoma. In 2019 he moved to Columbia University as a founding member and postdoctoral fellow in the Izar laboratory. His research aims to understand clinically relevant molecular disease mechanisms by studying cancer using two complimentary approaches: (1) Advanced multi-modal single-cell sequencing of real-life clinical tissue samples, and (2) pooled perturbation of patient-derived model systems to inform gene function and ultimately identify actionable targets. His postdoctoral work focuses on key clinical issues of melanoma care: Immune-evasion (Nature genetics, 2020), targeted therapy-resistance (Cancer Research, 2020), and brain metastases (Cell, 2022). In addition, he implemented and systematically improved tissue profiling protocols of clinical specimens for single-cell research (Nature genetics, 2022) and led a team of scientists to build a high-resolution cell atlas of the lung tissue response to COVID-19 (Nature, 2021a and 2021b).
Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Goran Micevic, MD, PhD, FAAD is a PhD-trained dermatologist interested in understanding how the immune system interacts with cancer in the skin. Dr. Micevic's initial interest in skin cancer stems from the Micevic family’s predisposition and subsequent experiences being treated for skin cancer. During training, Dr. Micevic had the opportunity to care for hundreds of patients with melanoma and witnessed the revolution brought upon by immune-modulating therapies. At the same time, Dr. Micevic witnessed the profound grief and disappointment when the same therapies stop working or fail to achieve a response.
The fundamental mechanisms governing T-cell interactions with melanoma cells, how different T-cell populations contribute to the anti-melanoma response, and how these interactions dictate clinical response remain poorly understood. Dr. Micevic's goal is to understand the antitumor immune response in the skin, with a focus on melanoma. Dr. Micevic envisions integrating tissue spatial transcriptomics from human tissue samples and single cell immunophenotyping to decipher the epigenetic regulation of antitumor responses in the skin. Using genetically engineered mouse models and clinical tissue samples, Dr. Micevic hopes to define the key epigenetic features that define functional T cell states as well as strategies to reprogram them. Reprogramming T-cell function could have broad applications in tumor immunology in general, but also in controlling chronic skin infections and treating autoimmune skin disease.
With patients and family members in mind, Dr. Micevic looks forward to a dedicated career in pursuit of improving therapies for skin cancers by understanding the key tumor-immune interactions in the skin as a physician-scientist.
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Jordan Gabriela Nestor, MD was raised between New York City and Guayaquil, Ecuador, within a loving [working-poor, medically-uninsured] family. They received thier medical care at Bellevue Hospital and spent countless hours in their waiting rooms. There, Dr. Nestor's mother went from one Spanish-speaking individual to the next, helping them complete medical forms and communicate with the staff, showing Dr. Nestor the importance of service and how anybody can be an advocate for others. As a medical student, Dr. Nestor visited a pod of six hemodialysis patients at a Bronx dialysis unit, once a week for three years. These individuals welcomed her into their lives and showed her the heaviness of their disease in their daily life, and its impact on their families and communities. She initially hoped to have a research career rooted in social determinants of health contributing to higher rates of chronic illness among disenfranchised communities. However, in 2010 the APOL1 G1/G2 alleles were discovered - common coding variants among individuals of West/sub-Saharan African ancestry significantly associated with kidney disease risk. This discovery opened Dr. Nestor's eyes to hereditary risks for kidney disease subtypes and led her to seek out Dr. Ali Gharavi as a research mentor. With the steadfast support and mentorship of Dr. Ali Gharavi and Dr. Krzysztof Kiryluk, she aspires to become an independent NIH-funded biomedical informatics researcher. Their focus on the need for ancestral diversity in genomic research aligns with Dr. Nestor's aspirations to serve understudied patient communities. In June 2020, at the peak of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Nestor completed 8 years of post-graduate clinical training to become an expert in kidney genetics. Now, she wants to meaningfully contribute to improving the long-term health outcomes of Black and Latino patients burdened by chronic illness by developing scalable, automated tools embedded in the electronic health record, that help clinicians use genomics at the point-of-care.
University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Alexander Nguyen, MD, PhD is a gastroenterology research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Tontonoz. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Through the Tri-Institutional Medical Scientist Training Program, he obtained his medical degree from Weill Cornell Medical College and doctoral degree from The Rockefeller University. He then completed his internal medicine residency at UCLA. His current training is supported by the UCLA Specialty Training and Advanced Research (STAR) program and an NIH T32 training grant.
During his doctoral research under the mentorship of Dr. Sohail Tavazoie, Dr. Nguyen utilized functional genetic screens in mouse models to identify genes that promote metastatic colonization of the liver by colorectal cancer. This work revealed clinically relevant pathways that could be targeted by small molecule therapies. In the Tontonoz lab, Dr. Nguyen studies novel mechanisms that govern physiologic cholesterol homeostasis in the liver. His goal is to understand lipid regulation in the liver to better diagnose and treat fatty liver disease.
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Richard P. Ramonell, MD is a Clinical Instructor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Florida and then went to medical school at the Florida State University College of Medicine. He then completed his residency in Internal Medicine, a year as Chief Medical Resident, and his fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Emory University. During fellowship, he worked in the lab of Dr. F. Eun-Hyung Lee examining B cell biology as it pertains to allergic disease and SARS-CoV-2 infection. After completing fellowship, he was recruited to the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh where he joined the lab of Dr. Anuradha Ray. He is currently investigating the role of T effector memory cells re-expressing CD45RA (TEMRAs) and “inflammaging” in the pathogenesis of severe asthma under the mentorship of Drs. Anuradha Ray and Sally Wenzel.
University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Aartik Sarma, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He studied biomedical engineering and public policy at Brown University and has an MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital before coming to UCSF for fellowship training pulmonology and critical care medicine. As an NHLBI F32 postdoctoral fellow, he trained with Dr. Carolyn Calfee, an expert in the prevention and treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome, and Dr. Stephanie Christenson, an expert in computational and genomic analyses of respiratory disease. Dr. Sarma's research is focused on understanding heterogeneous pulmonary diseases defined by broad clinical criteria including ARDS, pneumonia, and COPD exacerbations. He uses computational methods to study transcriptomic and metagenomic data, with the goal of identifying disease subphenotypes and describing their biology.
Cincinnati Children's Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Joshua Sheak, MD, PhD met his first Navajo man when he was five years old. This man was his grandfather, who taught him about hozhó. Hozhó is a philosophy that all life and experience is a cyclical and holistic continuum. As a student in the University of New Mexico MD/PhD program, a pediatric resident in the Integrated Research Pathway at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), and now as a neonatology fellow at CCHMC, Dr. Sheak has seen and studied the incredible and complex work accomplished by newborn infants. Clinical and research experiences during training helped me to see hozhó in being a member of the medical team that supports the health and survival of infants in their transition to the post-natal world. Foundational to this transition is lung function. Impaired lung function can lead to high pulmonary blood pressures and resistance to pulmonary blood flow in a disease called pulmonary hypertension.
Mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of neonatal pulmonary hypertension are poorly understood. Increased understanding of factors important to neonatal pulmonary hypertension can improve therapies for infants. As a graduate student, Dr. Sheak identified a novel role of enhanced nitric oxide-dependent pulmonary vasodilation to limit the degree of pulmonary hypertension in neonatal rats (PMID 28733445). He also demonstrated a role of PKCbeta and oxidant signaling to contribute to enhanced pulmonary arterial vasoconstriction in neonatal rats with pulmonary hypertension (PMID 31922892). As a pediatrics resident, Dr. Sheak investigated mechanisms of lung injury and repair in a Rhesus macaque model of chorioamnionitis (PMID 35353543), a risk factor for neonatal lung disease and neonatal pulmonary hypertension. His hope is that his work improves understanding of pulmonary hypertension and creates possibilities for new therapies for infants. Improved understanding facilitating therapeutic options for infants with pulmonary hypertension reflects a continuum of care and applies hozhó in medicine.
Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Jessica W. Tsai, MD, PhD is an Instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), attending physician in Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and a post-doctoral fellow in the Bandopadhayay Laboratory in the Department of Pediatric Oncology at DFCI. Dr. Tsai completed her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences with Honors in Neurobiology at Stanford University in 2008. She subsequently earned her MD/PhD in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Tsai's PhD training was in the Clandinin Laboratory in the Department of Neurobiology where she studied synapse maintenance and degeneration utilizing the Drosophila visual system. Dr. Tsai subsequently completed her clinical training in Pediatrics at the Boston Combined Residency Program in 2018, caring for children at both BCH and Boston Medical Center. She completed her Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Stem Cell Transplantation fellowship at the DFCI in 2021. Dr. Tsai's postdoctoral research focuses on delineating mechanisms underlying oncogenesis in pediatric brain tumors. In addition to her research, she attends on the inpatient Neuro-Oncology service and cares for patients in the outpatient Jimmy Fund Clinic. As a female, 2nd generation Asian American physician-scientist, Dr. Tsai firmly holds it is her obligation and duty to support a better scientific pipeline for future generations through advocacy, innovation, and strong mentorship.
Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Jonathan Michael Tsai, MD, PhD, as a physician-scientist, seeks to continue into an independent academic career with a clinical practice in molecular pathology and research focus understanding the relationship between protein degradation and transcriptional regulation. He began his training at the California Institute of Technology in Dr. David Baltimore’s laboratory where he completed his undergraduate thesis developing a high-throughput multiplexed assay to isolate T-cell receptor genes from single tetramer sorted T-cells. Dr.Tsai spent one year on a Fulbright fellowship at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel with Dr. Yosef Yarden, studying growth receptor signaling and cell migration. He completed his medical and graduate training at Stanford University in the Dr. Irving Weissman’s laboratory, where he identified the mesothelium as the cell-of-origin of peritoneal adhesions. As a Clinical Pathology resident and Molecular Genetics Pathology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dr. Tsai led the development of clinical diagnostic assays, particularly a targeted next-generation sequencing lymphoma panel with clinicians at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. For his post-doctoral work, he joined Dr. Benjamin Ebert’s laboratory where he characterized the E3 ligase UBR5 as a general regulator of nuclear hormone receptor degradation, showed that UBR5 degrades its substrates on chromatin, and surprisingly acts as a transcriptional activator. Dr. Tsai is currently focused on how UBR5 and E3 ligases use protein degradation to activate transcription. As a physician-scientist, he aims to leverage functional genomics, biochemistry, and epigenetics to understand how this affects oncogenesis by studying patient specimens in Pathology archives. Dr. Tsai's vision is to redefine how we think about transcription factor biology, as additionally regulated by protein degradation, which may lead to the consideration of E3 ligases as new actionable cancer targets.
Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Sarah Urbut, MD, PhD, is a current cardiology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA with an interest in statistics, genomics, and preventive cardiology. Originally from Illinois, she attended Princeton University where she became fascinated in the use of mathematics and statistics to answer questions in computational biology, particularly within genomics, while working in the lab of John Storey. Dr. Urbut then entered an MD/PhD program at the University of Chicago, where she completed her PhD with Matthew Stephens in the Department of Human Genetics and Statistics. She worked to develop Bayesian methods for predicting genetic effects across multiple phenotypes, using the GTEx data set as a model for genetic effects on gene expression across multiple tissues. She also developed an R package to make these tools widely available and furthered her interest in reproducible research. Dr. Urbut then began residency in internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. During her residency and now fellowship at MGH, she continued her work in genomics and statistics under the direction of Pradeep Natarajan, MD MMsc, where she applied the multivariate methods to GWAS data and later to polygenic prediction. Early in her cardiology fellowship she became fascinated with the discrepancy in short-term risk calculations and the misclassification of risk for younger individuals with greater lifetime risk and potential benefit. For her postdoctoral years, Dr. Urbut plans to combine new efforts in Bayesian risk modeling with causal inference to infer individualized lifetime risk prediction and therapeutic benefit for truly precision medicine. Outside of science and medicine, she enjoys road cycling, traveling, stand-up comedy and supporting the Chicago White Sox.
Queen's University Faculty of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)
About the awardee
Caitlyn Vlasschaert, MD, MSc, is a trainee in the Clinician-Investigator Program – concurrently undertaking an internal medicine residency and a PhD in Translational Medicine – at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Prior to her residency, she obtained her MD from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (2019) and a Master's degree in evolutionary genetics from the University of Ottawa, which was deemed the Best Thesis in any Science discipline by the university that year (2016). Her current research focuses on how the kidneys are affected by acquired genetic changes such as clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), a recently discovered hyperinflammatory disease of aging caused by mutations in hematopoietic stem cells that affects ≥10% of older adults. She has conducted seminal work showing that CHIP is associated with incident chronic kidney disease, faster kidney disease progression, and acute kidney injury. She holds a top-ranked Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) doctoral scholarship (ranked #1 among 418 applicants across Canada) and has published more than 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts, including 15 as first author. She aspires to become a clinician-scientist at the nexus of nephrology and genetics.