ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023

Sarah Urbut, MD, PhD, is a current cardiology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA with an interest in statistics, genomics, and preventive cardiology. Originally from Illinois, she attended Princeton University where she became fascinated in the use of mathematics and statistics to answer questions in computational biology, particularly within genomics, while working in the lab of John Storey. Dr. Urbut then entered an MD/PhD program at the University of Chicago, where she completed her PhD with Matthew Stephens in the Department of Human Genetics and Statistics. She worked to develop Bayesian methods for predicting genetic effects across multiple phenotypes, using the GTEx data set as a model for genetic effects on gene expression across multiple tissues. She also developed an R package to make these tools widely available and furthered her interest in reproducible research. Dr. Urbut then began residency in internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital. During her residency and now fellowship at MGH, she continued her work in genomics and statistics under the direction of Pradeep Natarajan, MD MMsc, where she applied the multivariate methods to GWAS data and later to polygenic prediction. Early in her cardiology fellowship she became fascinated with the discrepancy in short-term risk calculations and the misclassification of risk for younger individuals with greater lifetime risk and potential benefit. For her postdoctoral years, Dr. Urbut plans to combine new efforts in Bayesian risk modeling with causal inference to infer individualized lifetime risk prediction and therapeutic benefit for truly precision medicine. Outside of science and medicine, she enjoys road cycling, traveling, stand-up comedy and supporting the Chicago White Sox.