ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
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).