ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

The ASCI is pleased to recognize the 50 recipients of its 2023 Young Physician-Scientist Awards:

Alison Holley Affinati, MD, PhD

University of Michigan Medical School
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Despite recent therapeutic advances, over 50% of patients with diabetes still have sub-optimal glucose control. Identifying new therapeutic targets to effectively treat diabetes will improve morbidity and mortality in these patients. Alison H. Affinati, MD, PhD focuses on elucidating the systems that regulate glucose control and understanding how their dysfunction leads to diabetes.

Dr. Affinati completed her MD and PhD training at Northwestern University Medical Scientist Training Program, where she worked with Dr. Joe Bass to establish the molecular pathways linking the circadian clock to mitochondrial glucose and lipid metabolism. This work, which was supported by an NIDDK F30 NRSA, resulted in a first author publication in Science, along with several reviews.

After completing her residency and Endocrinology fellowship as part of the Physician-Scientist Training Program at the University of Michigan, Dr. Affinati decided to transition to studying how the brain controls glucose metabolism with Dr. Martin Myers. There she established the mechanisms linking neurons in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamic (VMN) to glucose homeostasis. She received support for this work via an F32 NRSA and from the Endocrine Fellows Foundation.

During these studies, Dr. Affinati observed that activating a specific group of VMN neurons increases glucose and elicits panic behavior, suggesting that this population is made up of multiple distinct neuronal groups with different functions. To develop VMN-targeted diabetes medications, these different neuronal types must be distiguished.

As she begins her independent career, Dr. Affinati aims to identify the specific VMN circuits that regulate glucose metabolism, and has obtained funding from the Warren Alpert Distinguished Scholar program and a NIDDK K08 to help support this research. Ultimately, Dr. Affinati and colleagues will separate the VMN circuits that regulate glucose from those that regulate panic, establish the mechanisms through which VMN neural circuits control glucose metabolism and lay the groundwork for future brain-targeted therapeutics for diabetes.

George A. Alba, MD

Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

George A. Alba, MD's parents emigrated from Cuba; and in his parents' immediate families, his father was the only person to attend college in the United States. Dr. Alba earned his MD at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and completed both Internal Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Durin his postdoctoral research fellowship, Dr. Alba obtained a National Research Service Award (F32) from the NHLBI to study hypoxia and platelet-endothelial interactions in pulmonary thromboembolism. He identified that the scaffolding protein NEDD9 is upregulated by hypoxia in pulmonary artery endothelial cells, binds to P-Selectin on activated platelets, and NEDD9 inhibition decreases pathogenic platelet-endothelial cell adhesion in vitro and in vivo. This resulted in a (pending) scientific patent for thier novel anti-NEDD9 antibody. Dr. Alba joined Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 2018 supported by a Harvard KL2 and the MGH Center for Diversity and Inclusion. He currently investigates the role of NEDD9 in mediating thrombotic pulmonary vascular dysfunction in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). As Associate Director of the Pulmonary CORE clinic at MGH, Dr. Alba cares for and study the acute and long-term cardiopulmonary consequences of ARDS and oversee the research protocols aimed at clinically and molecularly phenotyping ARDS survivors. In this context, he co-directs the MGH Program for Advancing Critical Care Translational Science (PACCTS), a comprehensive biorepository for critical illness syndromes, and is a sub-investigator on the Boston COVID-19 Recovery Cohort, part of the multi-center NIH RECOVER study. Recently, Dr. Alba was awarded the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program, a four-year K-equivalent career development award administered through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation intended to increase the diversity of academic medicine. Dr. Alba's project investigates anti-NEDD9 targeting as a novel therapeutic strategy for acute lung injury using animal models of ARDS. He is currently being promoted to Assistant Professor at HMS. 

Hermioni L. Amonoo, MD, MPP

Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Hermioni L. Amonoo, MD, MPP, is a physician-scientist, Assistant Professor, and Director of the Well-being and Cancer Research Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS). She is a graduate of HMS (MD), Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPP), the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Hospital Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program, and the BWH/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry/Psychosocial Oncology Fellowship Training Program. Her clinical training and expertise in caring for patients with serious medical illnesses and psychiatric comorbidities inspire her research program, which aims to understand the well-being needs of vulnerable cancer populations to develop innovative and practical psychological interventions and digital therapeutics for patients and their caregivers. She has authored several peer-reviewed journal publications and has received numerous national awards for her scholarship and research. Several local and national organizations, including HMS, the Harvard Catalyst, the BWH/Brigham Research Institute, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Oppenheimer Family Foundation, the American Society for Hematology, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have consistently funded her work.

Sylvan Baca, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Sylvan Baca, MD, PhD is a medical oncologist and translational investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Dr. Baca received his B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University and his M.D. and Ph.D. in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from HMS. He completed residency training in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a fellowship in medical oncology at the DFCI. Dr. Baca carried out his post-doctoral studies in cancer epigenetics with Dr. Matthew Freedman at the DFCI and the Broad Institute. 

Dr. Baca has led foundational work in prostate cancer genomics and epigenomics that is published in CellNature Genetics, and Nature Communications. His contributions include the identification of large-scale structural rearrangements – called chromoplexy – in prostate cancer genomes and the identification of FOXA1 and SPOP mutations in prostate cancer. In addition, his epigenome profiling studies identified FOXA1 as a master transcription factor in neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) and developed a blood-based biomarker for NEPC. He also developed a computational framework called Cistrome-Wide Association Study (CWAS) to uncover mechanisms underlying prostate cancer risk loci identified by genome-wide association studies. 

In addition to caring for patients, Dr. Baca runs a multidisciplinary dry lab focused on translational cancer epigenomics. The overarching goal of his lab is to advance precision oncology by studying epigenetic changes that drive cancer. The Baca lab brings together clinicians, computer scientists and cancer biologists and aims to define gene regulatory programs that underlie cancer initiation, metastasis, and treatment resistance. The lab conducts both "bench to bedside" and "bedside to bench" studies - for instance, developing predictive epigenetic biomarkers for treatment response and analyzing tumor epigenomes from clinical specimens to identify cancer drivers.

Stephen J. Balevic, MD, PhD

Duke University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Stephen Balevic, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Duke University, the Associate Director of Pharmacometrics at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, and the Assistant Scientific Director for the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) Registry.  His research interests are in precision medicine and drug trials with a special emphasis in vulnerable populations.  He has been principal investigator on several PK/PD studies supported by NIH, FDA, and private foundations. His research has improved clinical care by providing evidence based dosing recommendations for several drugs in children and pregnant patients. To further advance his mission of optimizing clinical trial design and dosing in vulnerable populations, he has served as Scientific Advisor to the US Food and Drug Administration, Office of Pediatric Therapeutics.

Dr. Balevic is also a quadruple board certified Adult and Pediatric Rheumatologist. He completed his medical degree at Marshall University, followed by residency training in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina, and dual subspecialty training in Rheumatology at Duke University. He then completed a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Pharmacy.

J. Nicole Bentley, MD

University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

J. Nicole Bentley, MD is a neurosurgeon-scientist with clinical and research appointments as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine. Her primary research interest is in understanding brain network dysfunction underlying cognitive impairment, using signal processing techniques and sophisticated imaging modalities to characterize both physiologic and pathophysiologic brain activity. She has previously been awarded an NIH Career Development (K) award to investigate these brain networks and has received foundation funding from the American Parkinson’s Disease Association. Dr. Bentley's laboratory has performed first-in-human intracranial cortical and subcortical recordings in Parkinson’s disease patients during an intraoperative cognitive control task. They have shown that theta-frequency power increases during response inhibition, which is not seen during the control condition. As Surgical Director of the UAB Movement Disorders Program and Co-Director of the Consortium for Neuroengineering and Brain-Computer Interfaces UAB, her clinical and research interests are closely aligned. Dr. Bentley performs deep brain stimulation and epilepsy surgeries, leveraging the unique environments allowed by these surgeries to study cognitive network neurophysiology. She is also highly active in extramural roles. These include serving on NIH study sections as part of the early-career reviewer program, serving on her sub-specialty’s scientific program committee, participating as invited faculty at the Kavli Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, serving on the Editorial Board for Journal of Neurosurgery: Case Lessons, and serving on the Executive Committee of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. As a woman in neurosurgery, Dr. Bentley represents only 12% of all neurosurgeons in the United States and Canada. Furthermore, as a surgeon-scientist, her role is markedly underrepresented in academic neurosurgery. Despite these challenges, Dr. Bentley's commitment to neuroscience is unwavering. Her laboratory looks forward to continuing rigorous scientific inquiry into cognitive brain networks, and they greatly appreciate the support and sponsorship of their academic communities.

Cary Boyd-Shiwarski, MD, PhD

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Cary Boyd-Shiwarski, MD, PhD has had a longstanding interest in renal physiology, starting with her PhD, then MD and now a career in Nephrology. She is an Assistant Professor in Medicine in the Renal-Electrolyte Division. In 2018, she was awarded a K08 grant to study With-No-Lysine (WNK) kinases in the distal kidney. Human mutations to WNK kinases have been implicated in inherited diseases of hypertension and hyperkalemia. Dr. Boyd-Shiwarski's laboratory uses cutting edge methods to study WNK kinases from the level of DNA all the way into animal models. They have made exciting discoveries that answer fundamental questions. At the molecular level they have found that WNK1 facilitates liquid-liquid phase separation to regulate cell volume during osmotic stress, and recently published the results in Cell. Another discovery they made was identifying how and why WNK1 precipitates into puncta in both mouse and human kidneys during dietary potassium depletion. They termed these puncta “WNK bodies” and found that they evolved to help maintain potassium homeostasis. This work was published in Molecular Biology of the Cell in 2018 and in BioRxiv in 2021. Dr. Boyd-Shiwarski is excited to take their benchtop discoveries and translate them into patient care. To achieve this, she is working to establish a Center for Kidney Genetics. The Center has already provided a diagnosis to many patients with renal diseases of unknown cause. The next phase will be to identify patients with variants of unknown significance and apply her basic science skills to help identify whether these variants are clinically relevant. Dr. Boyd-Shiwarski's 5-year plan includes obtaining R01 level funding to maintain her research, and to expand the Center for Kidney Genetics to include collaborations with her pediatric division and other research institutions.  Being part of groundbreaking work in both the laboratory and clinic has been incredibly rewarding and she is looking forward to the future.

David A. Braun, MD, PhD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

David A. Braun, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist dedicated to improving our understanding and treatment of renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Dr. Braun is the principal investigator of a laboratory focused on cancer immunotherapies and RCC at the Yale Cancer Center, the Goodman and Gilman Yale Scholar and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Urology at the Yale School of Medicine, and a medical oncologist specializing in the care of patients with RCC. He received his undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Princeton University, his medical degree from Mount Sinai, and his doctoral degree in computational biology from New York University. During his graduate studies, Dr. Braun also served as President of the American Physician Scientists Association (APSA). He completed his internal medicine residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (where he also served as Chief Resident) and his medical oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. During his fellowship research under the mentorship of Dr. Catherine Wu (with clinical and translational RCC mentorship from Dr. Toni Choueiri), Dr. Braun utilized computational and functional immunology approaches to dissect the immunobiology of RCC. His work has uncovered an interplay between somatic alterations and immune infiltration that influences immunotherapy response (Braun, Nature Medicine, 2020) and has identified a therapeutically targetable “immune dysfunction circuit” between terminally exhausted CD8+ T cells and immunosuppressive macrophages in advanced RCC (Braun, Cancer Cell, 2021). Dr. Braun's ultimate goal is to translate his laboratory findings into novel immunotherapeutic approaches (please see perspectives in Braun, Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, 2021; Braun and Wu, New England Journal of Medicine, 2022), and he has been fortunate to lead an investigator-initiated, first-in-disease phase I trial of personalized neoantigen vaccination as adjuvant therapy for high-risk RCC (manuscript in preparation). 

Daniel Russell Calabrese, MD

University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Daniel Russell Calabrese, MD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy, and Sleep at the University of California, San Francisco and a Staff Physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. He received his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and his MD at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine where his medical thesis focused on comparative anatomy.  He trained at the University of Washington in Internal Medicine and attended UCSF for fellowship. He completed additional clinical training in Advanced Lung Disease and Transplantation and a research fellowship with Dr. John Greenland.

As a pulmonary physician-scientist, Dr. Calabrese focuses on the mechanisms of innate immune activation and the cascade of inflammatory responses in the lung during acute and chronic injury. His lab employs animal models of lung transplantation, in vitro modeling, and human tissue samples in concert with modern immune and genomic profiling techniques with the goal to improve outcomes for patients after transplantation. His work has demonstrated important roles for Natural Killer cells in pulmonary CMV infection, antibody mediated rejection, and ischemia-reperfusion injury. He has received numerous awards and grants including a Career Development Award from the VA Office of Research and Development, the Harry Shwachman Clinical Investigator Award from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the Joel D. Cooper Award from the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation, and funding from the American Society of Transplantation and the NIH.

Jonathan Dale Casey, MD, MSc

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Jonathan Dale Casey, MD, MSc is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center with a focus on designing innovative and efficient clinical trials to improve outcomes for critically ill adults. This work is supported by grants from the NIH and Department of Defense and has spanned the gamut from proof-of-concept trials in extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to large comparative effectiveness trials embedded in the electronic health record.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Casey wrote the protocol for the NHLBI’s first trial of a repurposed drug for patients hospitalized with COVID-19.  The ORCHID trial, conducted by the Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL) Network, progressed from study conception to enrollment of the first patient in 15 days and completed enrollment in 4 months, providing critical evidence during the early phases of the pandemic.

While traditional, explanatory trials like ORCHID are the gold-standard for evaluating new drugs, they are too expensive and inefficient to address the innumerable treatment decisions that physicians confront every day in practice. To address this problem Dr. Casey's group, the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group (PCCRG), has developed novel approaches to embedding “pragmatic” randomized clinical trials within clinical care to rapidly generate evidence for common management dilemmas.  As the Director of the Clinical Coordinating Center for the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group, Dr. Casey has enrolled thousands of critically ill adults into highly efficient trials focused on emergency airway management, non-invasive respiratory support, fluid management, ECMO, and oxygen targets.  This work has been published in high-impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and the American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicine and has led to fundamental changes in the standards of care for critically ill adults.

Edmond M. Chan, MD

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Edmond M. Chan, MD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and medical oncologist at Columbia University Medical Center. He earned his BA in molecular and cellular biology at the University of California Berkeley and his MD at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. During his medical training, he performed research with Drs. William Hahn and David Barbie at the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Medical Student Research Fellow. He completed internal medicine residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital and medical oncology fellowship in the DFCI/Harvard Cancer Center program. He later joined the faculty at the DFCI/Brigham and Women's Hospital. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Adam Bass at the DFCI and Broad Institute. His work has been published several times in Nature and he has received grant funding from the NIH/NCI, Damon Runyon Cancer Institute, and ASCO. Dr. Chan started his laboratory at the Columbia University Medical Center in 2022 and is focused on leveraging genomic and functional genetic approaches to dissect the molecular mechanisms underlying the oncogenesis and survival of gastrointestinal cancers.

Xingxing Shelley Cheng, MD, MS

Stanford University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Xingxing Shelley Cheng, MD, MS is a practicing transplant nephrologist and a clinical investigator with an expertise in decision science. She has trained at diverse institutions including Washington University in St. Louis, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Stanford University School of Medicine, where she obtained a Masters in Health Services Research.

Her overarching research goal is to make better decisions based on the existing technology and state of knowledge. She is investigating decision-making at all levels of health care:

  1. As a society and as government agencies, how do we create payment structures and transplant policies to maximize benefit to all patients with kidney diseases?
  2. As a transplant institution, how do we create institution-level policies and programs to deliver quality care to our patients?
  3. As a practicing physician, how do we empower our patients to make the best decisions for their own health based on available information?

Her current research is in the following areas:

  1. the costs, effectiveness, and implementation of transplanted-related care in the run-up to kidney transplantation;
  2. ethics and policies of in multi-organ transplantation.

She is funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the American Heart Association. She is an active member of the American Society of Transplantation, American Society of Nephrology, and American Heart Association (Kidney in Cardiovascular Disease Council). She is serving (representative of the American Society of Transplantation) on the National Living Donor Assistance Center Advisory Group.

Raghu R. Chivukula, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Raghu R. Chivukula, MD, PhD is an early career physician-scientist whose research program bridges molecular genetics, cell biology, and pulmonary medicine. His long-term goals are to leverage Mendelian pulmonary disorders as model systems for elucidating biological principles underlying rare and common lung disease alike. Dr. Chivukula believes his training and track record positions him well to succeed in these goals. His graduate training provided him with a strong background in molecular genetics and epithelial biology, while his postdoctoral work extended this skillset to include cell biology and biochemistry. Finally, his clinical training as a pulmonologist affords direct experience with the many respiratory disorders which remain mysterious and deadly.

Though early in his independent career, Dr. Chivukula believes he has leveraged his hybrid training to make contributions to respiratory disease biology. These include the identification of a conserved distal lung regenerative process in human acute lung injury and the discovery and characterization of a genetic bronchiectasis syndrome caused by airway signaling dysregulation. Over the past 2 years, his lab has developed and validated new genetic and cell biological tools which allow them to investigate genetic forms of interstitial lung disease in unprecedented subcellular detail; they are hopeful that a molecular understanding of these disorders will facilitate new therapies targeting initiating events in pulmonary fibrosis.

Alongside his research efforts, Dr. Chivukula attends to patients in the intensive care unit and lectures undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate learners – striving to cultivate curiosity about basic mechanisms of disease in clinical and scientific trainees. Finally, Dr. Chivukula helps lead the MGH Pathways program, through which residents are mentored in identifying unusual “n=1” patients, thinking deeply about their biology, and bringing these extreme phenotypes into the laboratory for study. 

Andrew Chow, MD, PhD

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Andrew Chow, MD, PhD started his research career as an undergraduate volunteer in the laboratory of Marcel van den brink at MSKCC. Before immunotherapy became standard of care in many cancer types, his project in the lab focused on enhancing anti-tumor T cell responses through co-stimulatory receptor activation. His graduate work under the mentorship of Miriam Merad and the late Paul Frenette at Mount Sinai centered on the ontogeny and homeostasis of tissue resident- macrophages and their relevance in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell trafficking and red blood cell development. During the research phase of his medical oncology fellowship at MSKCC and continuing into his early faculty years, Dr. Chow has been mentored by Charles Rudin and Jedd Wolchok. A substantial portion of his post-doctoral research effort has focused on characterizing how Tim-4+ pleural and peritoneal macrophages impair anti-tumor T cell immunity in the serous body cavities. In parallel, he has also spent the last four years investigating human tumor-reactive T cells. Dr. Chow has contributed new insights into the transcriptional, proteomic, spatial and temporal characteristics of tumor-reactive T cells in human lung cancer.

As a natural extension of these studies, Dr. Chow's research group will leverage immunological principles to develop novel therapies to treat lung cancer. They will address two major questions during the initial phase of my research program: 1) What are strategies to not only block macrophage-mediated suppression but also leverage macrophage effector function? and 2) How do lung cancer-directed therapies (e.g. chemotherapy, PD-1 axis blockade, targeted therapies, and adoptive T cell therapies) modulate the quality and quantity of human tumor-reactive CD8 T cells?

Irene C.M. Cortese, MD

National Institutes of Health
(affiliation at time of recognition)

Elizabeth Crouch, MD, PhD

University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Elizabeth Crouch, MD, PhD, is a neuroscientist, a vascular biologist, and a physician in Neonatal-Perinatal medicine. Her lab, the Neurovascular Development lab at crouchlab.ucsf.edu, studies how brain blood vessels grow and interact with other brain cells. In part, this interest is inspired by germinal matrix hemorrhage, a complication of preterm birth that she cares for clinically. This hemorrhage can cause hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy, and death, and unfortunately there are currently no treatments. It remains unclear why vasculature in this developmental window is particularly sensitive. Her research resolves around defining the stages of vascular stem cells in the developing brain and understanding the mechanisms that regulate their functions. She then applies this knowledge to produce novel technologies and therapeutic strategies for different brain hemorrhages in neonatal and pediatric patients. Towards these goals, she utilizes neuropathological specimens, flow cytometry (FACS), bioinformatics, and cell culture, including organoid models. She has a track record of success in brain vascular biology, as the first to isolate endothelial and mural cells with Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) in the adult mouse (Crouch et al 2015, 2018) and the prenatal human brain (Crouch et al 2022).

Dr. Crouch obtained her MD/PhD degrees at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons followed by training in Pediatrics and Neonatology at University of California, San Francisco. She is grateful to have been funded in her work by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and the UCSF Preterm Birth Initiative. For fun, she runs the BreakingDownBiology blog (also funded by UCSF ImmunoX) to explain exciting scientific journal articles with every day language.

Felix Dietlein, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Felix Dietlein, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Core Faculty in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an Investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He completed medical school and doctoral degrees in mathematics and molecular medicine at the University of Cologne. He then pursued postdoctoral training in computational cancer genomics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. 

Dr. Dietlein’s laboratory focuses on the data-driven discovery of molecular changes in tumor genomes that provide actionable drug targets for genome-inspired therapies in precision medicine - using a multidisciplinary approach. Dr. Dietlein uses his mathematical training to invent statistical and data science concepts that open new areas of investigation. As a geneticist, he leverages complex genomic mechanisms to identify therapeutic targets. As a computer scientist, he completes resource-intensive software engineering tasks on petabytes of data. As an experimental biologist, he masters several strategies to validate his mechanistic discoveries. As a physician-scientist, he understands the translational potential of his work and the value of close collaborations between basic scientists and clinicians.

Dr. Dietlein’s scientific contributions to precision medicine include the following: Genome-wide discovery of mutations in the noncoding cancer genome and their multifaceted roles in tumor formation (Science 2022). A comprehensive resource for classifying coding drivers in 11,873 patients based on nucleotide contexts (Nature Genetics 2020). A new platform for designing driver-directed combination therapies and synergistic interactions of small-molecule inhibitors (Cell 2015). Cancer therapies based on synthetic lethal interactions between non-homologous recombination and mismatch repair (Cancer Discovery 2014). Driver-directed drugs for smoking-associated lung cancer (PNAS 2012; Cancer Discovery 2014). A new class of fluorine-18-labeled tracers with improved sensitivity for PSMA PET/CT imaging of prostate cancer patients in radiology (JNM 2017; 2020; 2022).

Darius Ebrahimi-Fakhari, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Darius Ebrahimi-Fakhari, MD, PhD is a board-certified Child Neurologist with expertise in neurogenetic, neurodegenerative, and movement disorders. Trained as a physician-scientist, he provides: A) a background in neuroscience and cell biology; B) expertise in autophagy, lysosomal biology, and mechanisms of neurodegeneration; and C) clinical and translational expertise in pediatric neurology. The objective of Dr. Ebrahimi-Fakhari's research is to create clinical trial readiness for rare neurological disorders and to develop molecular mechanism-based treatments.

Dr. Ebrahimi-Fakhari received his MD/PhD degrees from the Ruprecht-Karl-University Heidelberg, Germany. After residency training in Pediatrics and Child Neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Harvard Neurology Program, he completed a clinical fellowship in Movement Disorders. As a physician invested in neurogenetic and movement disorders, he is currently leading several clinical research projects related to genetic movement disorders in children. This includes the first natural history study for childhood-onset hereditary spastic paraplegia (NCT04712812, NCT05354622). As a basic scientist, Dr. Ebrahimi-Fakhari leads a team of trainees in several projects aimed at developing induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons and zebrafish as a platform for high-throughput small molecule and genetic screens to identify novel therapeutic targets. His team's approach to rare diseases has galvanized a large network of collaborators with this shared goal. Collectively their scientific work has resulted in >60 peer-reviewed publications and has received support from the NIH/NINDS, several foundations and industry partners.

After joining the faculty at Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. Ebrahimi-Fakhari now serves as the Director of the Movement Disorders Program. He takes care of children with movement disorders, the majority with severe, progressive conditions. He considers himself an advocate for families with rare diseases and serves this community clinically and scientifically. 

Robert Eil, MD

Oregon Health & Science University
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Robert Eil, MD is a surgeon-scientist with a long-term goal of advancing immunotherapies for solid cancers. Clinically, he is a fellowship-trained Surgical Oncologist with a focus on cancers involving the liver, bile ducts, and pancreas (hepatopancreatobiliary surgery). While all curative treatment approaches to these cancers include surgery, cytotoxic chemotherapies are minimally effective and recurrence is common. Dr. Eil's efforts focus on re-engineering immune cell function to develop and apply novel treatments.

Using the unique functions of T cells, a type of immune cell capable of cancer-killing behavior, significant progress has been realized over the past decade. For example, T cells engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) have produced high rates of complete response in patients with chemotherapy-resistant hematologic malignancies (i.e. lymphoma, myeloma).

Current barriers limiting effective use of CAR-T cells against solid cancers include an immunosuppressive microenvironment and unacceptable toxicities. To augment T cell function within tumors, Dr. Eil's team continues to build upon prior work identifying ion imbalances within tumors as an unrecognized and targetable immune checkpoint that limits T cell activity (Eil R, Nature 2016 & Science 2019). To alleviate the toxicities frequently produced by CAR-T cells when used against solid cancers, they have developed novel technologies to sequester CAR-T cells targeting tumor associated antigens within metastatic tumors, which they find effective in halting off-tumor toxicity in preclinical syngeneic models of cancer.

As a surgeon scientist facing patients with metastatic and recurrent cancers, Dr. Eil is uniquely motivated and positioned to apply his findings to first-in-human investigator-initiated clinical trials.

Ahizechukwu C. Eke, MD, PhD, MPH

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Ahizechukwu C. Eke, MD, PhD, MPH received his medical degree from the University of Calabar Nigeria, and completed Obstetrics & Gynecology residencies at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria (2010) and Michigan State University (2016), Master of Public Health (MPH) at Harvard (2011), and Fellowships in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he received his PhD in Clinical Investigation.

Dr Eke is an Associate Professor of Maternal Fetal Medicine and Gynecology & Obstetrics, and Director of Clinical Research within the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He specializes in maternal fetal medicine (high-risk pregnancies). His research focuses on the pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacogenomics of drugs used during pregnancy. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) of an NIH/NICHD K23 study titled “Understanding medication adherence benchmarks, safety and pharmacometrics of novel antiretrovirals in pregnant women living with HIV,” PI of a Center For AIDS Research (CFAR) study on “Tenofovir alafenamide pharmacokinetics in pregnancy and postpartum”, as well as co-PI with the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials (IMPAACT) network on the pharmacokinetics of several antiretrovirals used in pregnancy. His long-term professional goal is to establish an independent research program in pregnant women, with a particular emphasis on the discovery and elucidation of the pharmacology of novel medications used to mitigate pregnancy-related complications.

Dr Eke is an editorial board member of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM Evidence) and Obstetrics and Gynecology (the Green Journal). He is an active member of NIH study sections. He has served the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) in several capacities as Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer. He currently serves on ACOG’s National Committee on Practice Bulletins (CPG). Dr Eke is a recipient of several honors and awards.

Utibe R. Essien, MD, MPH

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Utibe R. Essien, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and a health services researcher at the VA Pittsburgh Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, where he practices clinically as a generalist. He completed his medical education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his internal medicine residency and general internal medicine fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. He received an MPH degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 2018, he joined the faculty at Pitt, where he is director of the Career Education and Enhancement for Health Care Diversity Program for medical students.

Dr. Essien’s research program examines racial and ethnic disparities in the implementation of novel, evidence-based therapies for the management of chronic cardiovascular diseases, particularly atrial fibrillation. His work provides a research framework for “pharmacoequity,” a concept he coined that describes how empirical studies can advance the goal of ensuring that all patients have equal access to life-saving therapies. His research is supported by grants from the American Heart Association, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His leadership and advocacy in health equity have been acknowledged with several research awards and a growing national reputation that is reflected in invitations to write commentaries for leading medical journals including JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and NEJM and deliver numerous national medical Grand Rounds.

Dr. Essien is also recognized for his expertise in science dissemination, actively engaging through social media and the lay press. He has been interviewed about his research by the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR and has authored op-eds for the LA Times and STAT News. He is the co-founder of the Antiracism in Medicine podcast and is an associate editor at JAMA Network Open.

Benjamin Goldman-Israelow, MD, PhD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Benjamin Goldman-Israelow, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Section of Infectious Diseases at Yale School of Medicine. He completed his undergraduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in biology, and subsequently joined the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai for MD and PhD training. He pursued his graduated research in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Evans, where he developed a novel cell line to study the hepatitis C virus lifecycle and utilized this system to study interactions between HCV and the innate immune system, as well as other host cell factors. For his work, he received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. Dr. Goldman-Israelow next joined the Yale Internal Medicine ABIM Physician-Scientist Residency Pathway, completing his internal medicine and Infectious Diseases subspeciality training. During his fellowship, he joined the Laboratory of Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, where he led and contributed to multiple studies in human and animal models aimed at understanding the immunopathologic mechanisms underlying COVID-19 pathogenesis and immunity. He received the Iva Dostanic Physician-Scientist Award, and his research is supported by an NIAID K08 award. Dr. Goldman-Israelow’s lab focuses on defining the signals that control mucosal adaptive immunity to respiratory pathogens—and specifically, exploring the intersection between innate and adaptive immunity to characterize how innate signals at the respiratory mucosa modulate tissue specific adaptive immunity. He is working to leverage this knowledge to design more effective mucosal vaccines that function to both protect the individual and reduce transmission of emerging and re-emerging respiratory pathogens.

Abby Margaret Green, MD

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

As a physician-scientist, Abby Margaret Green, MD seeks to bridge scientific discovery with translational potential. She is a pediatrician with subspecialty training in both oncology and infectious diseases. Her clinical practice is at the intersection of these fields; she directs the Immunocompromised Infectious Diseases program at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. In the lab, her research program aims to identify sources of mutagenesis in cancer genomes. The APOBEC3 enzymes are cytidine deaminases that provide anti-viral immunity through mutation of viral genomes. However, these DNA mutators encoded by the human genome come with a price: off-target activity causes mutations and damage that threaten host genome integrity. Dr. Green's lab studies how APOBEC3 enzymes become dysregulated, their molecular interactions with human genomes, and the potential for APOBEC3-mediated mutations to promote cancer development or evolution. Her lab is well supported by institutional, foundation, and federal funding.

As a post-doctoral trainee in Dr. Matthew Weitzman’s lab, Dr. Green benefitted from his generous mentorship. As an independent investigator, her goal is to pay mentorship forward. She is active in the graduate program at Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM). She serves on admissions committees, teaches in the primary curriculum, serves on qualifying exam and thesis committees, and frequently hosts rotation students. Additionally, Dr. Green is thesis advisor to two pre-doctoral students in her lab. Aiding in scientific and career development is an incredibly satisfying component of the faculty role.

In addition, Dr. Green is an active member of several scientific communities that provide important collaborations and camaraderie. She is a member of the Siteman Cancer Center and is on Leadership Council for the Center for Genome Integrity at WUSM. Dr. Green was recently awarded membership in the Society for Pediatric Research and is active in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. Connecting with these communities has enhanced her scientific and clinical pursuits.

Scott M. Haake, MD, PhD

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

As a kidney cancer-focused investigator, Scott M. Haake, MD, PhD leads a research team focused on the study of basic mechanisms of cancer development and progression and seek to actively translate this knowledge into interventions that improve the lives of cancer patients. For example, they have a DOD-funded project that seeks to develop a novel liquid biopsy assay that can be used to estimate tumor burden and investigate tumor biology in a non-invasive and “real-time” manner. These liquid biopsy techniques could be used to characterize response to immunotherapy, monitor patients who have a deep and/or complete response to immunotherapy and wish to discontinue therapy, and detect minimal residual disease and thus prioritize patients for adjuvant therapies. Other DOD-funded studies seek to develop RNAseq-based biomarkers that match approved first line therapies to the unique biology of an individual patient’s tumor, thus testing the hypothesis that this tailored therapy will result in superior clinical outcomes. The DOD and the Kure It Foundation have funded correlative projects to further explore the unique biology of these RNAseq-defined tumor subtypes. Other DOD funding seeks to train artificial intelligence to identify immune cell infiltrates and predict for immune response using simple H&E images of human tumors. The focus of Dr. Haake's NCI K08 award is to study the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) signaling during tumor initiation and evolution. Early data from this work demonstrate that cancer cells exhibit constitutive, ligand-independent activation of ECM receptors, and this signaling is required for tumor initiation. Dr. Haake's research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Cell, Cancer, Clinical Cancer Research, and others. As a board-certified medical oncologist, he has a kidney cancer-focused clinic and cares for patients at both Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Nashville VA Hospital. 

Sarah J. Hill, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Sarah J. Hill, MD, PhD is a physician scientist and independent investigator in the Department of Medical Oncology and Division of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her lab is focused on understanding the mechanisms of BRCA1-linked breast and ovarian carcinogenesis and therapeutic sensitivity and resistance.  She completed her AB at Harvard College, her PhD at Harvard University in the laboratory of Dr. David Livingston at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and her MD at Harvard Medical School in the Harvard-MIT HST program.  She is also a Rhodes Scholar and completed an MSc in biochemistry at Oxford University. Upon graduation from the Harvard MD/PhD program, she trained in pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She was recruited to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to start her own independent laboratory immediately upon completion of her residency training. Simultaneously, and with the support of her PhD mentor, she won an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (DP5). 

Jing Hughes, MD, PhD

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Jing Hughes, MD, PhD is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania MSTP and completed residency and fellowship training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at Yale University. She trained with Drs. Kevan Herold, Janet McGill, and David Piston in both clinical and basic science research in type 1 and type 2 diabetes. As an early-stage investigator, she is funded by an NIH K08 and R03 and is an avid collaborator in the Human Islet Research Network (HIRN) and clinical studies including the Rare and Atypical Diabetes Network (RADIANT). The Hughes Lab works on primary cilia in islet cells, using genetic models and live imaging to study the consequences of cilia perturbation in human ciliopathies as well as type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Key publications from the Hughes Lab have bridged the islet and cilia fields and continue to shape our understanding of cilia actions in human health and disease. 

Titilayo Omolara Ilori, MD, MSc

Boston University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Titilayo Omolara Ilori, MD, MSc is a physician scientist with expertise in nephrology, epidemiology, nutrition, genetics, and global health. Her goal is to be an independent, patient-oriented researcher, skilled in conducting mechanistic and interventional studies on the modifiers of kidney disease. Dr. Ilori completed medical school in the University of Lagos, Nigeria and moved to the United States for internal medicine residency training at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. During fellowship training in nephrology at Emory University, she completed a basic science post-doctoral research fellowship working with Dr. Jeff Sands. At the time, Dr. Ilori made a major discovery that the urea transporter, (UT-A1) can be phosphorylated by tacrolimus, a calcineurin inhibitor, an important finding because it showed that tacrolimus could phosphorylate UT-A1 independent of vasopressin. Dr. Ilori switched gears to patient-oriented research because of her passion to find solutions to the intricate drivers of health disparities among individuals of African descent. Her formal training in clinical research includes a Master of Science from Emory University and certificate courses from Columbia and Harvard, all in Clinical Research. Dr. Ilori has worked within various population and CKD cohorts in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. She rose to Assistant Professor at Emory and transitioned to the University of Arizona (UA). As a coinvestigator in the All of Us Research Program, and the Associate Director of Clinical Research and Global Health Initiatives at the UA, she lead a team that enrolled >20,000 individuals underrepresented in biomedical research. Now as an Assistant Professor at Boston University, she received a K23 career development grant from the NIH studying diet by gene interactions in Apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) kidney disease, caused by a powerful genetic risk variant affecting individuals of African descent. Dr. Ilori's lab recently discovered that dietary potassium interacts with APOL1 genotypes, a finding that we are confirming in clinical and mechanistic studies.  

Sarah Elizabeth Johnstone, MD, PhD

Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Sarah Elizabeth Johnstone, MD, PhD received her PhD in Genetics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 working with Dr. Richard Young.  Subsequently, she went to medical school at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, completing her degree in 2012. During her MD, she pursued research with Dr. Steve Baylin at Johns Hopkins.  She then completed her Anatomic Pathology and Gynecologic Pathology residency and fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital.  Following this, her post-doctoral research was performed in Dr. Bradley Bernstein’s lab at Harvard Medical School.  She published a groundbreaking study evaluating changes to the 3D genome structure that occur in tumors and probing how these functions are related to aging cells and suppress tumor growth. This work suggests new avenues to understand nuclear organization and how it functions in cancer development.

These accomplishments as a postdoctoral fellow reflect a long-standing interest in epigenetics. Dr. Johnstone has published all together 15 papers, 4 first author. She has presented her research to national audiences, including the 2020 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Epigenetics and Chromatin Meeting. She recently received a K08 grant from the National Cancer Institute to support her work and has received multiple awards for her research and scholarship, including an MGH Cancer Center Excellence Award (2019-2020). In 2021 she joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School as an Assistant Professor of Pathology.  Her laboratory is focused on understanding the impact of epigenetic and topological alterations in cancer genomes.

Sikandar Hayat Khan, DO, MS

Indiana University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Sikandar Hayat Khan, DO, MS is a Pulmonary and Critical Care physician at Indiana University School of Medicine and a Young Physician-Scientist with a research focus at the nexus of acute respiratory failure, delirium, and dementia. He is funded by the National Institute on Aging's Paul Beeson Emerging Leaders Career Development Award to study the relationship between oxidative stress pathways and accelerated cognitive and physical aging in survivors of critical illness. In this grant, Dr. Khan is studying regulators of oxidative stress, oxidative DNA damage, and changes in oxidative injury to lipids and proteins utilizing longitudinal blood samples paired with cognitive and physical function assessments. As a clinical-translational scientist, Dr. Khan's work has led to publications on the relationship among biomarkers of neuroinflammation, astrocyte cell activation, systemic inflammation, and delirium duration, and mortality. He has also published on the relationship between age of red blood cells and clinical outcomes, and the overlap between Alzheimer's pathology and biomarkers of delirium. Dr. Khan’s mission is to advance the care of critically ill older adults by developing endotypes for intensive care unit (ICU) delirium. Dr. Khan’s goal is to use biomarker profiles to develop and test personalized medicine interventions to promote recovery after critical illness. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Khan has advanced the collection of biospecimens from critically ill COVID-19 patients and COVID-19 survivors, and obtained cognitive, physical, mental health, and quality of life outcomes from COVID-19 survivors paired with blood sample collection. While he continues his translational studies of these biospecimens, Dr. Khan has implemented a multidisciplinary clinic to provide care for patients recovering from severe COVID-19 (at the Indiana University Health ICU Survivor Center).

Sameed Ahmed Mustafa Khatana, MD, MPH

University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Sameed Ahmed Mustafa Khatana, MD, MPH is a cardiovascular health services and policy researcher, a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, and a non-invasive cardiologist at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center. His research is dedicated to understanding how socioeconomic factors, social and public policies, and other factors such as environmental variables, impact the cardiovascular health of patients from vulnerable populations. This work is funded by career development awards from the NHLBI and the American Heart Association.

In one recent manuscript, published in JAMA, Dr. Khatana and colleagues demonstrated that diverging trends in economic prosperity across the United States after the Great Recession were associated with growing disparities in cardiovascular mortality rates in the United States between different parts of the country. Another area of interest is the cardiovascular care of patients experiencing homelessness. In two previous papers, published in JAMA Internal Medicine and the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Dr. Khatana's team explored aspects of care provided to patients experiencing homelessness when they were hospitalized. In ongoing work, funded by a pilot award from the Department of Veterans Affairs, he is investigating how homelessness impacts cardiovascular care and health outcomes for veterans with cardiovascular disease. In the summer of 2022, Dr. Khatana and colleauges authored two manuscripts, published in JAMA Network Open and Circulation, exploring how extreme heat influences all-cause and cardiovascular mortality rates and the racial and ethnic disparities in this association. This work was covered by many media outlets, and Dr. Khatana was interviewed on national television on NBC News and Fox Weather to discuss the findings of their work. Dr. Khatana's career goal is to continue to advance his career as a cardiovascular health services researcher and to become an independently funded physician-scientist.

Rohan Khera, MD, MS

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Rohan Khera, MD, MS is an Assistant Professor in Cardiovascular Medicine and Health Informatics at the Yale School of Medicine, where he leads the Cardiovascular Data Science (CarDS) Lab. He is also the Clinical Director of the Center for Health Informatics and Analytics at the Yale/YNHH Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. Dr. Khera’s work focuses on developing and applying innovations in data science to improve cardiovascular care. He graduated from the prestigious All India of Medical Sciences where he was a National Young Investigator Scholarship Awardee. During his internal medicine residency training at the University of Iowa and his cardiology fellowship training at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dr. Khera received the American College of Cardiology’s Young Investigator Award and the Francois Abboud Young Investigator Award, in addition to being inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society for his academic accomplishments. Dr. Khera also received the Jeremiah Stamler Distinguished Young Investigator Research Award for 2021.  

He is a recipient of a K23 Award from the National Institutes of Health, and a Clinician-Scientist Development Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. He leads a broad portfolio in health innovation science. First, he has led the development of automated assays of care quality within the electronic health record. Second, he has developed novel technology for detecting structural heart diseases through applications of deep learning and artificial intelligence to electrocardiographic images and wearable devices. Third, he has spearheaded methodological development for personalized inference from randomized clinical trials using machine learning. Finally, he is designing solutions to scale data science innovations through novel federated learning approaches. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed studies in leading medical journals. In addition to science, Dr. Khera has developed a program to mentor early career scientists in applied healthcare data science. 

Derek Mark Klarin, MD

Stanford University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Derek Mark Klarin, MD uses genomic approaches to better understand the etiology of atherosclerosis, vascular disease, and their associated risk factors including lipids and thrombosis. In collaboration with other investigators, his research interests focus on elucidating the genetic basis of complex vascular disease traits. His recent work has expanded the understanding of genetics of lipids as well as arterial and venous disease through large-scale genetic analysis. By combining methods in computational biology, statistics, and epidemiology, he has used the discovered risk genes/mutations to identify those at greatest risk for lower extremity ischemia, thrombosis, and limb amputation.

As a vascular surgeon, Dr. Klarin has created a unique niche in his field and the cardiovascular field overall through an emphasis on genomic and precision medicine techniques for otherwise understudied vascular diseases. Moving forward, he plans to focus specifically on understanding the driving factors that cause vascular disease in one vascular bed (coronary, cerebral, peripheral, or venous) over another, as well as the underlying genetic factors that contribute to aneurysm disease. To achieve this, he will continue to focus on (1) variant/gene discovery; (2) phenotyping strategies utilizing large-scale electronic health record (EHR) data to increase discovery power for understudied cardiovascular syndromes; and (3) defining the mechanisms by which newly identified mutations impact disease. His long-term goals entail leveraging these insights clinically for preventative and therapeutic intervention.

Kenneth Lim, MD, PhD, MPhil, FASN

Indiana University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Kenneth Lim, MD, PhD, MPhil, FASN is an American Physician-Scientist and Nephrologist and currently holds appointments as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anatomy, Cell Biology & Physiology at Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), and Attending Physician at IU Health. Prior to joining the faculty at IUSM in 2020, he spent over 10 years at Harvard Medical School and affiliated major teaching hospitals, later becoming Attending Physician at The Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He is a clinical trialist and translational scientist, and leads a research group that focuses on the development and delivery of definitive trials in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and associated cardiovascular (CV) complications, and the development of advanced therapeutics. Currently, a substantial gap exists in the lack of robust outcomes trials in patients with CKD and critically, the need for better clinical trial endpoints to track cardiovascular decline or improvement. To help counteract this problem, his research pioneered the entry of state-of-the-art Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET) technology into the field of nephrology. He founded the first CPET laboratory dedicated to the study of patients with kidney disease in the United States at IUSM. His research has provided foundational evidence that CPET-derived endpoints are superior to cardiac geometric endpoints for tracking cardiovascular alterations in states of impaired kidney function. His work has helped answer important questions on ventilatory exercise derived responses in CKD. The technology could have potential widespread applications for example, in identifying high risk kidney patients for earlier or more aggressive medical or dialytic therapy, and could help improve current prioritization strategies for patients on the kidney transplant list (whereby the already scarce availability of donor organs could be better allocated to patients who need it most) and improve survival for kidney patients.

Kah Poh Loh, MBBCh BAO, MS

University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Kah Poh Loh, MBBCh BAO, MS is a geriatric hematologist and oncologist, specializing in the care of older adults with myeloid malignancies. Dr. Loh leads all geriatric hematology clinical efforts at her institution, including building a de novo geriatric hematology consultative clinic, inspiring and helping to organize geriatric hematology clinical trials, and training local and international mentees.

Dr. Loh's research focuses on developing and implementing behavioral and supportive care interventions, particularly digital health technologies, to improve outcomes for older adults with cancer. These interventions include a patient-centered communication tool to faciltiate shared decision making, a mobile health exercise intervention to reduce functional decline during cancer treatments, and a serious illness communication intervention delivered via telehealth to facilitate goal-concordant care. She is supported by a National Cancer Institute (NCI) K99/R00, National Institute of Aging (NIA) R03 GEMSSTAR Award, the American Society of Clinical Oncology Conquer Cancer Foundation Career Development Award, and the Wilmot Cancer Institute Research Fellowship Award. She has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles and presented over 130 oral and poster presentations, and has also received >30 research and travel awards.

Nationally, Dr. Loh was a member of the ASCO Annual Meeting Education Committee for Geriatric Oncology (Chair 2020-2021) and the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) Cancer and Aging Special Interest Group (Chair 2021-2022). She is a member of the Junior Investigator Board and Junior Faculty Lead in the Analytics Core for the NIA-funded Cancer and Aging Research (CARG) R21/R33 infrastructure grant, member of the American Society of Hematology Committee on Education Affairs, Board member of the International Society of Geriatric Oncology (SIOG), and member of the AGS Research Committee as well as the Methods, Annual Meeting, and NIA subcommittees.

Dr. Loh has mentored over 20 trainees and faculty both locally and internationally. She has served or currently serves on four PhD dissertation committees (Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Nursing) and a Master capstone project (Biostatistics).

Nadim Mahmud, MD, MS, MPH, MSCE

University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Nadim Mahmud, MD, MS, MPH, MSCE is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), where he serves as a Transplant Hepatologist in his third year on faculty. While Dr. Mahmud has a strong interest in patient care and manage patients at both Penn and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, he is invested in a clinician-scientist career. After completing a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at Penn, Dr. Mahmud joined faculty, received an American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Junior Faculty Development Grant and a National Institutes of Health K08 Award. As a fellow he recognized that patients with cirrhosis had significant post-operative risk, however the tools available to risk stratify and counsel patients had major limitations and were outdated. The focus of his ACG and K08 awards was to address this gap by developing a novel risk prediction model from a large dataset of patients with cirrhosis undergoing diverse surgeries. Working with multi-institutional collaborators, he derived a tool called the VOCAL-Penn Score in the Veterans Health Administration, and subsequently externally validated this tool in two independent health systems. This tool accurately predicted post-operative mortality and hepatic decompensation in patients with cirrhosis across different classes of major surgeries. As a testament to the clinical impact of the VOCAL-Penn Score, it has been used by over 18,000 unique users around the globe to assist in risk stratification in the past 12 months. Building on this experience, Dr. Mahmud has subsequently deepened his expertise in risk prediction modeling, pharmacoepidemiology, and causal inference methodology. This has allowed him to explore diverse research questions pertaining to management of patients with chronic liver disease, and to date he has published over 90 peer-reviewed manuscripts, many in high-impact journals such as JAMA SurgeryGastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, JAMA Internal Medicine, and Hepatology.

Jennifer Manne-Goehler, MD, ScD, ScM

Mass General Brigham
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Jennifer Manne-Goehler, MD, ScD, ScM is an adult infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is originally from Miami and completed her undergraduate education at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Following her undergraduate education, Dr. Manne-Goehler was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea where she studied mandatory testing for sexually transmitted infections among entertainers in US military camptowns. She then went on to earn her MD from Boston University School of Medicine and both a Master of Science and Doctor of Science from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Manne-Goehler's dissertation centered on evaluating programs to prevent and treat Chagas disease in Guatemala and Peru. Following this, she completed internal medicine residency and fellowhip in Infectious Diseases in Boston. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of diabetes and HIV, including a K23 Career Development Award that seeks to trial interventions to prevent diabetes in people with HIV. Additionally, she is the co-founder of a global data collaborative called the Global Health + Population Project on Access to Care for Cardiometabolic diseases (HPACC) and a co-investigator of the Health and Aging in Africa: A Longitudinal Study of an INDEPTH Community in South Africa (HAALSI) cohort study. Dr. Manne-Goehler is eager to translate research findings into policy and has been an advisor to the World Health Organization regarding their global diabetes strategy since 2020. As a faculty member, Dr. Manne-Goehler is deeply committed to increasing equity in academic medicine and has led several initiatives to advance the careers of women in medicine and currently co-lead a summer internship program in the BWH Division of Infectious Diseases for students from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine. Finally, Dr. Manne-Goehler is married and has two young children; in her free time, she enjoys long-distance running.

 

Jessica E. Manning, MD, MSc

National Institutes of Health
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Jessica E. Manning, MD, MSc is an infectious diseases physician-scientist who directs the International Center of Excellence in Research CAMBODIA, a research collaboration between the Cambodian Ministry of Health and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Dr. Manning began her clinical research career studying malaria as an NIH Fogarty International Clinical Research Fellow in Mali, West Africa.  After graduating from Emory University School of Medicine, she completed the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity and Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and her Infectious Diseases fellowship training at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She also holds a Masters degree in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. Since 2013, she has spent most of her time in Southeast Asia focused initially on treatment regimens for multidrug-resistant malaria, and more recently, on understanding arboviral epidemics and developing better tools to mitigate them.  In 2017, she re-located to Cambodia to further NIAID’s mission of conducting international translational and clinical research related to vector-borne and other emerging pathogens followed by her appointment as a NIAID Assistant Clinical Investigator in 2019. Her research aims encompass both: 1) characterization of the host immune response to mosquito saliva and arboviruses in order to develop vector-based countermeasures to vector-borne disease epidemics; and 2) application of pathogen metagenomics in resource-scarce, outbreak-prone areas to better understand disease transmission of vector-borne and emerging pathogens.

Danny E. Miller, MD, PhD

University of Washington School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Danny E. Miller, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in the Departments of Pediatrics, Division of Genetic Medicine, and Laboratory Medicine & Pathology. Danny completed his medical and graduate work at the University of Kansas, in affiliation with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, followed by a combined residency in Pediatrics and Medical Genetics at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. The mission of the Miller lab is to reduce the burden of undiagnosed genetic diseases on patients and their families by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of genetic testing, and to better understand human genetic disease through the identification and characterization of novel disease-causing variation. To do this, the Miller lab uses new technologies, such as long-read DNA and RNA sequencing, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of genetic testing and to identify and characterize novel disease-causing genetic variation. The lab is actively working to develop new long-read sequencing-based clinical tests to increase the rate of genetic diagnosis and shorten the time required to make a genetic diagnosis. Danny first began using long-read sequencing during his graduate training at the University of Kansas and the Stowers Institute for Medical Research under the mentorship of R. Scott Hawley, and later continued to gain expertise in the field while performing research in Evan Eichler’s lab during his combined residency in Pediatrics and Medical Genetics at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. Clinically, Danny sees patients in general genetics clinic as well as skeletal dysplasia clinic at Seattle Chidlren's Hospital. 

Arun Padmanabhan, MD, PhD

University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

While his commitment to a career as a physician-scientist is now unwavering, Arun Padmanabhan, MD, PhD has had an unconventional journey to this point. He attended college intending to study biomedical engineering but was surprised to discover a greater interest in and aptitude for his biology and chemistry courses. Dr. Padmanabhan enrolled in medical school intending to return home to serve his local community as a physician upon completion of his clinical training. However, his fortuitous participation in a year-long Sarnoff Fellowship in Dr. Jonathan Epstein’s laboratory saw his excitement for science snowball culminating in his transfer into the combined MD-PhD training program. The environment and mentorship in the Epstein laboratory were incredible. Dr. Padmanabhan became interested in the molecular mechanisms governing cardiac and neural crest development which he studied in the context of neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). His focus on cardiovascular research provided opportunities to interact with many cardiology physician-scientists who swayed him towards this field. As a cardiologist with training in developmental biology, Dr. Padmanabhan remains completely enthralled by the complex interplay of gene regulatory circuits that orchestrate cell fate decisions during organogensis and have been extending these principles to understanding cell state transitions in heart failure pathogenesis. Dr. Padmanabhan's decision to pursue a physician-scientist career came about from interactions with like-minded individuals who described the exhilaration associated with discovery and demonstrated that groundbreaking scientific investigation and high-quality clinical care are entirely compatible. One of his greatest joys is “paying it forward” in this respect by promoting scientific exploration to all the trainees he is afforded the opportunity to work with, through the leadership roles he has assumed in recruitment of science-focused residents and fellows, and in directing a program for rising physician-scientists through the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.

Bhakti K. Patel, MD

University of Chicago Medical Center
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Bhakti K. Patel, MD is a clinical trialist specializing in complex multidisciplinary interventions to improve outcomes in patients with respiratory failure. Her scholarship has been built on a foundation of collaboration, innovation, and program development. Dr. Patel has conducted clinical trials examining the long-term outcomes in patients enrolled in two trials of helmet ventilation in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and early physical/occupational therapy during mechanical ventilation, known as early mobilization. We have demonstrated that the impact of helmet ventilation extends beyond its ventilator-sparing potential as helmet ventilation is the only known intervention to improve the long-term outcomes in ARDS survivors. Dr. Patel has continued her work on mitigating disability after critical illness, in a second clinical trial examining one-year outcomes with early mobilization for which she received a K23 career development award. Her preliminary findings suggest that early mobilization is the first known intervention to improve long-term cognitive impairment in survivors of mechanical ventilation.

In addition, Dr. Patel has collaborated extensively with data- and translational scientists to illuminate the biologic plausibility of clinical phenotypes identified within critical illness syndromes such as sepsis. Her team's biospecimen repository of serial blood samples in patients with sepsis have been used to understand the biology underlying timing of resolution of septic shock and support the plausibility of temperature trajectory subphenotypes. She haS also collaborated with Eric Pamer, MD to collect serial fecal samples in critically ill patients with respiratory failure and shock to understand how immunomodulatory fecal metabolite profiles may predict mortality in COVID-19 patients with respiratory failure. These discoveries were published in Critical Medicine and Nature Communications.

Yana Pikman, MD

Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Yana Pikman, MD is a pediatric oncologist focused on implementation of genomics into the care of pediatric patients with leukemia, and using clinical findings to guide laboratory-based genomic target validation, development of combination drug treatments, and thus informing targeted early phase clinical trials for pediatric patients with acute leukemia. Dr. Pikman received an AB in Biology from Barnard College, an MD from Harvard Medical School (HMS), and completed pediatrics residency training at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH)/Boston Medical Center. She completed pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship training at BCH/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and her post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Kimberly Stegmaier. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at HMS and the DFCI.

Dr. Pikman's collaborative research program bridges the gap between basic and clinical research. She is the overall PI for the 15-institution LEAP Consortium Matched Targeted Therapy clinical trial, determining the feasibility of identifying actionable alterations with a matched therapy for pediatric patients with relapsed/refractory or high risk leukemias, and this has now expanded to another study focused on implementing clinical genomics for patients at Northeast regional centers.  This work has revealed novel genomic findings and treatment hypotheses which she is studying in pre-clinical models, with a focus on developing ways to target alterations that are associated with more difficult to treat leukemia. Dr. Pikman's team have identified mutations in the Ras signaling pathway as being among the most prevalent in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and associated with poor outcomes. They are studying novel methods to inhibit this pathway. They are also working with leukemia samples from patients to inform mechanisms of chemotherapy sensitivity and resistance. Dr. Pikman's research has been recognized through publications as well as invited talks. Her work has received funding from a number of organizations, including a K08 career development award from the NIH.

Derek W. Russell, MD

University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Derek W. Russell, MD is a K08-funded investigator with active research spanning the translational spectrum. His bench/translational research, anchored by a 2019 co-first author publication in Cell, explores the role of extracellular vesicles in the pathogenesis of inflammatory lung diseases such as COPD. This work has revolutionized the scientific understanding of long-held tenets of protease-antiprotease biology in general and the pathogenesis of COPD in particular, and his lab's findings have already been confirmed and reproduced by multiple other groups. In parallel with his laboratory work, Dr. Russell also leads an active clinical research program in critical care medicine. As Co-Director of the UAB Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine Program in Medical ICU Research (PRIMER), Dr. Russell designs, conducts, and coordinates clinical and observational trials in the ICU setting at UAB Medical Center. He was Study PI and Protocol Chair for a 1,065-patient 11-site U.S. pragmatic randomized trial of critically ill adults examining the effect of fluid bolus on hemodynamics during intubation, which was recently published (first author) in JAMA. Dr. Russell serves on the Executive, Steering, and Protocol Committees for the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group (PCCRG), a national research consortium of about 25 research sites that specializes in pragmatic trials of critical care medicine interventions such as tracheal intubation. He also serves or has served as site principal investigator (PI) for 7 other studies of tracheal intubation in critically ill patients in the ICU and emergency department (ED) with the PCCRG. Furthermore, Dr. Russell is site PI and member of key committees for a number of other prominent national and international research consortia such as the I-SPY COVID Consortium (BARDA, DTRA, DOD), ACTIV/PETAL (NHLBI), and STRIVE (NIAID/NCATS).

Jennifer Rymer, MD, MBA

Duke University Medical Center
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

As a clinical researcher and interventional cardiologist, Jennifer Rymer, MD, MBA plans to devote her career to improving the care and outcomes of patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) and acute coronary syndromes (ACS). Dr. Rymer cares for patients at Duke and at a community hospital with poor access to care who present with advanced PAD and are at high risk of limb loss. Much of her clinical work is focused on limb salvage, and this clinical work has become the basis for her research. Dr. Rymer received an American Heart Association Career Development Award to develop an instrument that assists the clinician with prescribing appropriate guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) for patients with PAD and assessing barriers to adherence to GDMT. Additionally, she was awarded the Women As One Research Award for my work in validating patient-reported outcomes in patients with advanced PAD and in African American patients with PAD. For this work, she was recently honored with the Linnemeier Award, one of the top early career investigator awards given to an academic interventional cardiologist by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation. Dr. Rymer is passionate about mentoring trainees interested in pursuing a career in clinical research. She is currently the PI of a program sponsored by Pfizer to engage underrepresented minority college students in clinical research training to foster a more diverse workforce in clinical research. Dr. Rymer was awarded by the Duke Medicine Residency with the 2022 research mentor of the year for my devotion to mentorship. She also enjoys her roles as national PI on a 12-site registry of cangrelor use in patients with myocardial infarction (MI) which has enrolled 3,000 patients; and as a co-investigator on the SOS-AMI trial of selatogrel use in post-MI patients. Finally, Dr. Rymer is the data coordinating center PI for the NCDR CathPCI and Chest Pain MI Registries at the DCRI.

Jennifer Lillian Small-Saunders, MD, PhD

Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Jennifer Lillian Small-Saunders, MD, PhD is an Infectious Diseases physician-scientist who studies molecular mechanisms of antimalarial drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum parasites. She received her MD and PhD degrees from the Weill Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional MD/PhD program, where she studied mechanisms of acid resistance and cytochrome c maturation in Mycobacterium tuberculosis under the guidance of Dr. Sabine Ehrt. She then completed Internal Medicine residency and Infectious Diseases fellowship at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). Her postdoctoral studies were performed in the laboratory of Dr. David Fidock, where she investigated the landscape of mutations in the P. falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter, PfCRT, and how these mutations contribute to parasite resistance to chloroquine and piperaquine in Asia and Africa. Now, as a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases, she uses novel mass spectrometry and gene editing techniques to study the role of tRNA modification reprogramming and translational control in resistance to the first line antimalarial, artemisinin. The goal of her work is to uncover novel stress-response pathways in malaria parasites that can be targeted for new antimalarials. Her work has been supported by a Doris Duke Physician Scientist Fellowship, an NIH/NIAID K08 Career Development Award and a Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Scholar Award, the last of which is granted to early-career, tenure track physician-scientists at CUIMC. In addition to her laboratory research, she attends on both the Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases teaching services and mentors MD/PhD students, residents, and fellows.

Mark E. Snyder, MD

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Four years ago, Mark E. Snyder, MD started a laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh studying the role of lung tissue resident memory T cells (TRM) in health and disease.  Specifically, the Snyder lab focuses on the role of alloreactive TRM in the development of chronic lung allograft dysfunction. Prior to this, Dr. Snyder trained in both clinical epidemiology, working with Dr. David Lederer studying the impact of body physiometry on primary graft dysfunction after lung transplantation, and fundamental immunology, completing his post-doctorate with Dr. Donna Farber studying the generation and maintenance of human lung TRM.  Working with these world-class mentors taught me that a career in science can and should be both intellectually fulfilling and enjoyable; a sentiment he works hard to recreate with those currently training in his laboratory.  

Dr. Snyder finds the University of Pittsburgh to be a collaborative community providing an environment that promotes intellectual curiosity and innovation. Through collaborations with a diverse group of scientists from Cardiothoracic Surgery, Pharmacology, Immunology, and Systems Biology, he has established two translational models to study human lung TRM.  First, as co-director of the Pitt Ex-Vivo Research Core, Dr. Snyder's team uses ex-vivo lung perfusion of human lungs to study how the local mucosal environment impacts lung TRM function and how systemic and inhaled immune modulators alter TRM survival and activity.  Next, studying longitudinal bronchoalveolar lavage samples from lung transplant recipients, they are investigating molecular drivers of recipient TRM generation and alloreactive potential.  Through their use of single cell RNA and T cell receptor (TCR) sequencing, Dr. Snyder's team is actively cloning expanded TCRs and performing high-throughput epitope screening.  Their preliminary data suggests that alloreactive T cells, recruited to the lung during acute rejection persist as highly cytotoxic TRM contributing to chronic airway inflammation leading to CLAD.  Importantly, it seems these TRM are protected from systemic immune modulators.

Andrew B. Stergachis, MD, PhD

University of Washington School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Andrew B. Stergachis, MD, PhD is motivated by the question of how alterations in gene regulation contribute to human disease. This question has developed out of experience witnessing both the potential and limitations of genomic medicine in his roles as a clinical geneticist, and basic science researcher. Specifically, although we have the tools to map the human genome, we currently lack an ability to systematically interpret much of its material – a shortcoming that limits both our ability to understand human diseases as well as our ability to translate genomic discoveries into clinical therapies. To address this, Dr. Stergachis has pursued an understanding of gene regulation and human disease—a journey that to date has led him through undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and chemistry at the University of Chicago, a PhD in Genome Sciences and an MD from the University of Washington, and both internal medicine and medical genetics residency training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Along the way, Dr. Stergachis demonstrated how a cell’s reading of the genetic blueprint changes during normal development, oncogenesis, and human evolution, and more recently have developed a method for single-molecule chromatin fiber sequencing (Fiber-seq) that has provided fundamental insights into basic principles of gene regulatory patterns and chromatin architecture. This work has been recognized by multiple awards, including a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists, an NIH Director's Early Independence Award, and a Pew Biomedical Scholars award.

More recently, Dr. Stergachis joined the faculty at the University of Washington, where his lab focuses on applying and further developing single-molecule chromatin fiber sequencing technologies for understanding how the genome is regulated during human development and disease, including studying gene regulation within previously unchartered portions of the human genome. In addition, he cares for patients in the cardiovascular genetics and adult genetics clinic.

Andrew S. Terker, MD, PhD

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Andrew S. Terker, MD, PhD, is currently an Assitant Professor in the Division of Nephrology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He completed his medical school training and graduate work at Oregon Health and Science University, where he studied distal nephron regulation of sodium and potassium transport. He arrived at Vanderbilt in 2017 where he completed his internal medicine residency and completed his fellowship work in Ray Harris’ laboratory. He studies the interaction of environmental and genetic effects on kidney injury and electrolyte balance. He spends his time away from the laboratory hiking, biking, climbing, and skiing with his wife, Samantha, and his three sons, Brody (9), Judah (6), and Ari (4).

Elizabeth M. Viglianti, MD, MPH, MSc

University of Michigan Medical School
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Elizabeth M. Viglianti, MD, MPH, MSc is a pulmonary critical care physician, health services researcher, and expert in both sexual harassment in academic medicine and persistent critical illness. She received her MD degree from Duke University, MPH from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and MSc from University of Michigan (U-M). To date she has published 32 papers, including 24 peer-reviewed manuscripts—including 12 first-author and 1 senior-author. She won a Minority grant award from the American Thoracic Society, F32 and Loan Repayment Awards from NHLBI, and was accepted to U-M’s K12 program on implementation science. Dr. Viglianti was also awarded a K23 from NHLBI on first submission in June 2020. 

Dr. Viglianti's research in critical care has been instrumental in defining the epidemiology of persistent critical illness, showing that: 1) new late organ failures are common; 2) patient characteristics on ICU admission cannot predict the development of persistent critical illness; 3) hospital variation exists in the development of persistent critical illness in the U.S.; 4) higher-performing hospitals have lower rates of persistently critically ill patients.4-8 This is the foundation of her NIH NHLBI K23. 

Dr. Viglianti's research on patient-perpetrated sexual harassment has brought significant attention to a particular type of perpetrator of sexual harassment experienced by clinicians—patients and their families. To address this issue, she developed an algorithm to guide physicians on how to handle patients who make a clinical encounter unsafe because of sexual harassment. This algorithm was published in The Lancet, and she was subsequently invited byThe Lancet to speak on this work in London. Dr. Viglianti has since evaluated policies at top U.S. medical schools and patient bills of rights and responsibilities at U.S. training hospitals evaluating them for guidance on patient-perpetrated harassment. Her work has resulted in invitations to speak on this work throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Celestine N. Wanjalla, MD, PhD

Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Celestine N. Wanjalla, MD PhD is an Assistant professor and physician-scientist in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Clinically, she cares for patients with HIV at the Comprehensive Care Clinic and on the Infectious Disease consult service. The goal of her research is to understand the role of virus-specific immune cells in diabetes and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease pathogenesis in persons living with HIV. She earned her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences with a distinction in research from Cornell University, worked as a research assistant at Columbia University in the Division of Pharmacology, completed her MD and PhD in Immunology and Microbial pathogenesis at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases training at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her long term goal is to define innate and adaptive immune markers that can improve the diagnosis, identify novel therapeutic targets and improve clinical outcomes. She is a recipient of a K23 from NHLBI, the Career Awards for Medical Scientists (CAMS) from Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Development Award.

Parker C. Wilson, MD, PhD

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Parker C. Wilson, MD, PhD focuses his clinical and research efforts on exploring the pathways that contribute to kidney disease progression. He recently accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania and will be starting his lab there in January 2023. The Wilson laboratory will be in the Division of Diagnostic Innovation and will focus on analyzing kidney tissue with single cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, and other high-throughput NGS-based methods. Dr. Wilson is particularly interested in modeling the effects of germline and somatic variation as they relate to kidney disease progression at the single cell level. These efforts will be supported by the Penn-CHOP Kidney Innovation Center, which is a brand new research collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that aims to bring kidney researchers together across institutions. 

Dr. Wilson did his residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology followed by a fellowship in Renal and Genitourinary Pathology at Yale. He did a second fellowship in Molecular Genetic Pathology at Washington University in St. Louis where he began collaborating with his research mentor, Dr. Benjamin Humphreys. Dr. Humphreys is a pioneer in single cell sequencing and working in his lab has given Dr. Wilson the opportunity to apply his expertise in computer science and genetics. Since arriving at Washington University in July 2019, they have co-authored 7 original manuscripts and 6 review articles. Some of the highlights include a first-author paper in PNAS describing the first single cell RNA sequencing analysis of human diabetic kidney disease, a co-first author paper in Nature Communications describing the first integrated analysis of single cell RNA and ATAC sequencing in human kidney, and another co-first author paper in Nature Communications describing the first integrated analysis of single cell RNA and ATAC sequencing in human diabetic kidney disease.