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
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.