ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Mona Mashayekhi, MD, PhD first experienced research as an undergraduate, where she spent three years in Dr. Marisa Alegre's basic immunology laboratory at the University of Chicago studying T cell activation in the context of transplantation. During her MD/PhD training at Washington University in St Louis, Dr. Mashayekhi joined Dr. Kenneth Murphy’s lab and expanded her immunology expertise by investigating the transcriptional control of dendritic cell development and learning advanced techniques in cellular and molecular biology. She was productive during her undergraduate and graduate years, contributing to 13 manuscripts including a co-first author in PNAS, a first author in Immunity, and significant contributions to a manuscript in Nature. She also received a Howard Hughes Summer Fellowship in 2003 and an AHA Predoctoral Fellowship in 2010.
During her clinical training at Vanderbilt, Dr. Mashayekhi was intrigued by studies showing that obesity-induced chronic inflammation plays a role in cardiometabolic disorders. She merged her immunology background with these clinical interests to develop a research area in the multidisciplinary field of immunometabolism. As a mouse immunologist with seven years of molecular and cellular basic science experience, she was driven during her fellowship to extend her research to humans. Dr. Mashayekhi joined the lab of Dr. Nancy Brown who is an expert in hypothesis-driven human studies. She worked to develop new skills in patient-based discovery research and human immunology to complement her prior experiences. She has contributed to sixteen manuscripts: fourteen published including three first-author, and two submitted or in revision. Her research was selected for an oral presentation at the annual Endocrine Society conference in 2019, and she received an NIH Loan Repayment Program award and an Endocrine Fellows Foundation grant. Dr. Mashayekhi also received the Vanderbilt Faculty Research Scholars career development award for this work in July 2020.