Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2022

Martina Absinta, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Martina Absinta, MD, PhD, is a neurologist with an international PhD in Molecular Medicine. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH, Bethesda, USA), from 2012 to 2019, she dedicated her research work to ultra-high-field 7T MRI–neuropathology correlations in multiple sclerosis, and related identification of novel imaging biomarkers of chronic inflammation (with special focus on microglia-mediated and leptomeningeal inflammation). Starting 2019, she became faculty at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA), and more recently she established her own research group at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University Hospital in Milan, Italy. In the last few years, her work highlighted the clinical relevance of chronic inflammation and chronic active/smoldering lesions in driving clinical progression in multiple sclerosis and prompted for the planning of novel-designed MRI-based clinical trials aimed at treating such perilesional chronic inflammation. To better understand the immunological mechanism operating at the chronic active lesion edge and to identify new therapeutical targets, she recently built a detailed cellular blueprint of multiple sclerosis lesions using single-nucleus RNA sequencing of human MS tissue and identified C1q as critical mediator of microglia activation. Over the years, her research has been supported by the National MS Society, the Conrad Hilton Foundation, the Roche Foundation, the Cariplo Foundation, Fondazione Regionale per la Ricerca Biomedica, and, the International Progressive MS Alliance. Her scientific work has been published in high impact scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Reviews Neurology, Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), eLife, and JAMA Neurology.

Adewole S. Adamson, MD, MPP

The University of Texas at Austin
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Adewole (Ade) S. Adamson, MD, MPP, is an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine (Division of Dermatology) at Dell Medical School (DMS) at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his medical degree with honors from Harvard where he also completed a master’s in public policy as a Zuckerman Fellow in the Center for Public Leadership. Dr. Adamson completed residency in dermatology at the University of Texas Southwestern in 2015, followed by 3 years as an instructor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the faculty as a tenure track assistant professor at DMS in 2018, where he is the director of the Melanoma and Pigmented Lesion Clinic.

Dr. Adamson is a health services researcher whose research program focuses on addressing both underuse and overuse of health care. His work in addressing health disparities in the treatment and prevention of melanoma within vulnerable populations has been supported by grants from the Dermatology Foundation and the American Cancer Society. Dr. Adamson’s work on overuse in health care has focused on understanding the scope and potential harms of overdiagnosis, which has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Behdad (Ben) Afzali, MD, PhD, MRCP(UK)

National Institutes of Health
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Ben Afzali, MD, PhD, MRCP, is an Earl Stadtman Investigator and a consultant nephrologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), NIH. He received his medical and doctoral training in the United Kingdom at the medical schools of Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College London, respectively. He undertook fellowship training on the South Thames Nephrology training program and post-doctoral training in immunology with John O’Shea at the NIH. His laboratory studies how environmental signals in tissues are integrated via networks of transcription factors to direct the basic mechanisms of tissue inflammation, its resolution and healing. Currently, the main focus of this research program is the role of the complement system and the BACH2 transcription factor. Research contributions in the last five years include the following: 1) description of BRIDA syndrome, a primary immunodeficiency disease mediated by haplo-insufficiency of the BACH2 transcription factor; 2) description of the CD161+ sub-population of human regulatory T cells as a BACH2-dependent Treg population with wound healing properties in the gastrointestinal mucosa; 3) identification of infected lung epithelial cells as a local source of complement in SARS-CoV-2 infection; and 4) description of a complement-induced cell-intrinsic BACH2-dependent Vitamin D signaling system involved in the shut-down program of inflammatory T cells. 

Sean T. Agbor-Enoh, MD, PhD

National Institutes of Health
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Sean T. Agbor-Enoh, MD, PhD, completed medical school at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, and a PhD and post-doctoral training in Molecular Biology at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC. He then pursued residency at Johns Hopkins, where he was also Chief Resident. His joint clinical fellowship training was in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health. He joined NHLBI as a Staff Clinician and is now Tenure Track Investigator through the Lasker Clinical Research Fellowship and NIH Distinguished Scholar Programs. He is Chief of the Laboratory of Applied Precision Omics. 

Dr. Agbor's research mission is to improve lung transplant survival by developed better approaches to detect and effectively treat lung transplant rejection. For children and adult with advanced lung diseases, transplantation is often the only treatment. Unfortunately, half of these patients die within 5 – 6 years of transplantation primarily from rejection. Biopsy is the gold standard to detect rejection. However, biopsy is invasive with procedure-associated complications. Additionally, biopsy samples are analyzed by histopathology, which is limited  by low sensitivity and high inter-observer variability. Consequently, with this approach, diagnosis often remain elusive even when patients present with significant loss of allograft function. Could more sensitive approaches improve detection of rejection? 

Dr. Agbor now leads the Genomic Research Alliance for Transplantation (GRAfT), a collaborative of NHLBI and 5 transplant centers to recruit transplant patients and collect samples. With this resource and a basic science laboratory, he developed cell-free DNA, a blood-based approach to detect transplant rejection. This approach is sensitive and reliable, detects rejection earlier than biopsy, can be used to guide treatment response, and can risk stratify patients for long-term outcomes. Dr. Agbor is planning a clinical trial to test if early detection and treatment of rejection guided by cell-free DNA improves survival in lung transplant patients. 

Natasha M. Archer, MD, MPH

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

About the awardee

Natasha M. Archer, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a physician-scientist in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital. She earned her MD from Yale University School of Medicine and completed an Internal Medicine and pediatrics residency at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric hematology/oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Dr. Archer’s research is dedicated to studying the effects of hemoglobin type on P. falciparum infection and translating these findings to improve outcomes for children with sickle cell disease (SCD).

Pavan Bachireddy, MD

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Pavan Bachireddy, MD, obtained his MD from the Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. After his fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he completed his postdoctoral training in Catherine Wu’s laboratory, integrating multi-omic molecular measurements at bulk and single cell resolution to glean insights into the determinants of immunotherapeutic outcomes. In 2021, he joined the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center as an Assistant Professor, co-appointed in both the Departments of Hematopoietic Biology & Malignancy as well as Lymphoma & Myeloma, where he also serves as the Scientific Director of ECLIPSE. His group uses unbiased discovery tools to decode co-evolving leukemic-immune interactions that shape patient outcomes. Specifically, he has used bulk molecular signatures to demonstrate reversal of T cell exhaustion during response to adoptive cellular therapy (Blood, 2014), uncovered diverse patterns of leukemia-infiltrating immune cells corresponding to distinct clinical outcomes to ipilimumab (NEJM, 2016; Blood, 2021), and has identified a novel biomarker of outcome to CTLA-4 blockade in metastatic melanoma (Cell, 2018). More recently, he has utilized multi-omic discovery approaches to elucidate the biological determinants of graft-versus-leukemia (GvL) response and resistance, finding that distinct leukemic evolutionary trajectories underlie timing of leukemic relapse after allo-SCT (STM, 2020). Finally, he has pioneered longitudinal monitoring of intraleukemic T cell populations using innovative computational tools to identify the T cell states that define outcomes to adoptive cellular therapy (Cell Reports, 2021) and PD-1 blockade (Blood Advances, 2021).

Floris Barthel, MD

City of Hope Medical Center
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Floris Barthel, MD, is an assistant professor at The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen; Phoenix, Arizona) and City of Hope (CoH; Duarte, California) where he oversees a cancer genomics laboratory focused on utilizing state-of-the-art genomic approaches to study the development and evolution of glial brain tumors (gliomas). The lab has a particular interest in the fundamental role of telomere dysfunction in glioma development, but is generally interested in all aspects of evolution including but not limited to longitudinal studies of therapy response assessed by genomic analysis of tumor tissue and liquid biopsies. The lab has received both government (eg. National Institutes of Health) and philanthropic funding for several translational and basic science research projects in this domain. Prior to joining TGen/CoH, Dr. Barthel was a postdoctoral fellow at the MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston, Texas) and the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine (Farmington, Connecticut). His work has led to numerous publications in top-tier journals including Nature and Cell and played a small part in recent updates to the World Health Organization guidelines for the classification of brain tumors. In addition to primary appointments at CoH and TGen, Dr. Barthel holds adjunct appointments with the School of Life Sciences at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University and the Department of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He is the recipient of various awards, including the William Guy Forbeck Research Foundation Scholar Award in 2019 and the Brain Tumor Charity Celebrating You Research Rising Star Award in 2020.

Georgia M. Beasley, MD

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

About the awardee

Georgia M. Beasley, MD, is an associate professor of surgery in the division of Surgical Oncology at Duke University and has a secondary appointment as an associate professor in the department of medicine. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Duke University. While an undergraduate, she was a 2-time conference player of the year for the Duke Women’s basketball team; she was inducted into the Duke Athletics Hall of Fame in 2014. After playing 3 years in the women’s NBA, she returned to medical school. She obtained her MD (2008) and Masters of Health Science in clinical research (2010) from Duke University School of Medicine. She then completed general surgical residency at Duke University in 2015, during which time she was awarded a traineeship under a long-standing Surgical Oncology T32 grant. She then completed a fellowship in complex surgical oncology at the Ohio State University in 2017. She returned to Duke in 2017 as a faculty member. In 2019, she became co-director of the Duke Melanoma Program.

Dr. Beasley is a surgeon scientist with active involvement in clinical and translational research. Her work primarily focuses on studying and utilizing the innate immune system to both predict and enhance response to immune checkpoint blockade. She is the site PI for several clinical trials, leads investigator-initiated trials, and has independent laboratory projects in oncolytic viral therapy and application of immune therapy. She is also board certified in both general surgery and surgical oncology and has an active clinical practice treating patients with melanoma. She has authored over 90 publications centered on melanoma. She has received multiple internal and external funding including the Society of Surgical Oncology’s Young Investigator Award and an NIH K08 mentored physician-scientist award.

Whitney Besse, MD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Whitney Besse, MD, is a physician-scientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Section of Nephrology at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Besse's lab researches genetic kidney diseases, with a focus on polycystic kidney disease, using translational and genetic approaches. Dr. Besse has an active research program recruiting patients with phenotypes on the spectrum between genetically unsolved autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) and isolated polycystic liver disease (PCLD, also known as ADPLD), as well as  other inherited kidney diseases for studies involving novel gene discovery and variant analysis. The goal of her lab is to use the identification of novel disease genes to guide molecular biology investigation that contributes to a better understanding of disease mechanism and the identification of successful treatment approaches.

Elizabeth Bhoj, MD, PhD

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Elizabeth Bhoj, MD, PhD, has always centered her research interests on human molecular genetics, and specifically how it can inform basic science research and the diagnosis of genetic disorders. In her faculty work, she has specifically focused on pediatric disorders, which hold the potential to benefit from timely intervention. This has required many years of specialized training. Dr. Bhoj received her MD and PhD through the Medical Scientist Training Program at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas with a focus on patient-driven gene discovery. She also was awarded a Masters of Translation Research from the University of Pennsylvania, where she gained additional translational research skills. For clinical training, she graduated from the pediatrics/medical genetics combined residency program and clinical molecular genetics fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). As a result, she is board-certified in three specialties: pediatrics, clinical genetics, and molecular genetics. After clinical training, she joined the Center for Applied Genomics under Hakon Hakonarson as a postdoctoral research/instructor.

In 2018, Dr. Bhoj started an independent laboratory at CHOP as an assistant professor (tenure-track) at Penn. Her laboratory focuses on novel gene discovery in pediatric Mendelian disorders, and a deep mechanistic understanding on a subset of those diseases. She has led multiple international disease-discovery consortia, some with over 100 collaborators from dozens of countries. Her lab uses many modalities, including mouse models, iPSCs, patient-derived cells, and computational biology. As a leader in the field of translational genetics, Dr. Bhoj's work has been recognized with the multiple awards. She has been awarded the Landenberger Family Foundation Research Award, Burroughs-Wellcome Foundation Career Award for Medical Scientists, Society for Pediatric Research Physician-Scientist Award, Roberts Genomics Forefront Award, Bowes Award in Medical Genetics from Harvard Medical School, as well as funding from NICHD, NINDS, NLM, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

Jonathan R. Brestoff, MD, PhD, MPH

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

About the awardee

Jonathan R. Brestoff, MD, PHD, MPH, completed his MD and PhD at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. David Artis, where he studied how Interleukin (IL)-33 and Group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) regulate thermogenic beige fat to limit the development of obesity. He then moved to Washington University School of Medicine for residency in Clinical Pathology, during which time he led studies on intercellular mitochondria transfer from adipocytes to macrophages in white adipose tissue while working with Dr. Steven L. Teitelbaum. For this work, Dr. Brestoff received the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award and Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists and started his independent research laboratory at Washington University School of Medicine in 2019. The Brestoff Lab is focused on understanding how the immune system regulates the function of metabolic organs, especially white, beige, and brown fat. A major theme in the lab is to understand how and why some cells transfer mitochondria to other cell types in vivo and to determine whether this biological process can be harnessed therapeutically. Another major theme in the lab is to study how macrophages and other innate immune cells regulate metabolic disease pathogenesis.

Aaron Carlin, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Aaron Carlin, MD, Ph.D, is an infectious disease specialist and scientist. He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Di­seases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego. He attended the University of California Los Angeles for his undergraduate studies followed by the Medical Scientist Training (MD/PhD) Program at the University of California San Diego. As a graduate student in the laboratories of Drs. Victor Nizet and Ajit Varki, Dr. Carlin demonstrated that group B Streptococcus (GBS) utilizes molecular mimickry and direct protein interactions to engage Sialic acid-binding immunoglobulin-type lectins (Siglecs) on human innate immune cells. This interaction impairs antimicrobial functions increasing GBS pathogenesis. Dr. Carlin was then selected for the Physician-Scientist Training Program (PSTP) and completed an internal medicine residency, infectious disease fellowship, and served as chief-fellow of infectious diseases at the University of California San Diego. During his fellowship, he performed postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Christopher Glass where he developed innovative unbiased genome-wide approaches to investigate host-viral interactions. In 2019, Dr. Carlin joined the faculty as a tenure track Assistant Professor and started his independent research laboratory where he investigates emerging and reemerging infectious diseases and their interactions with the immune system. The overarching goal of Dr. Carlin’s research is to improve current therapeutic and diagnostic strategies by identifying the specific mechanisms that drive infectious disease pathogenesis. He has received several honors, including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists and an NIAID K08 award.

Jeeyeon Cha, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Jeeyeon Cha, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist studying sexual dimorphism in metabolism with a goal to simplify and personalize the care of patients with diabetes. She is a Clinical Instructor in the Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She completed MD/PhD training at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati where she trained under Sudhansu K. Dey, PhD in reproduction. She then joined the Vanderbilt Physician-Scientist Training Program (PSTP, or Harrison Society) and completed residency in Internal Medicine in 2017 and Adult Endocrinology fellowship in 2020. She is now studying sexually dimorphic responses of the pancreatic islet beta cell in diabetes with mentor Roland Stein, PhD. Dr. Cha’s work has been supported by the NIH, a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Physician-Scientist Fellowship, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists.

Monica Chang-Panesso, MD

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

About the awardee

Monica Chang-Panesso, MD. is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Nephrology at the School of Medicine in Washington University in St. Louis. She obtained her medical degree from Texas Tech University School of Medicine and Internal Medicine residency training at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX. Dr. Chang-Panesso then completed a Nephrology Fellowship at the combined Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Massachusetts General Hospital program where she pursued post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin Humphreys to understand the mechanisms underlying acute kidney injury and repair. She then relocated to Washington University in St. Louis to continue her postdoctoral training in the Humphreys lab and subsequently joined the faculty at the Division of Nephrology. Most recently, Dr. Chang-Panesso became the first recipient of the endowed Roger M. Perlmutter Career Development Assistant Professorship in Medicine, which aims in helping support early-career physician scientists from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine and science to become independent investigators. Dr. Chang-Panesso’s research interest is understanding the molecular mechanisms that drive the injury and repair response after acute kidney injury and how these differs in renal aging. Her research is supported by a NIDDK K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award. 

William Damsky, MD, PhD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

William Damsky, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine and board-certified dermatologist and dematopathologist. In clinical practice, he specializes in evaluation and treatment of patients with inflammatory skin disorders, especially cutaneous granulomatous diseases such as sarcoidosis and granuloma annulare. Dr. Damsky is interested in the identification and evaluation of new treatment approaches for inflammatory skin disease and conducts clinical trials in this area. As a physician-scientist with training in basic immunology, Dr. Damsky’s laboratory leverages the latest immunologic approaches to understand mechanisms of inflammatory skin disease and how they are affected by novel therapies. Dr. Damsky’s research has been supported by Career Development Awards from the Dermatology Foundation and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He was awarded the 2020 Young Investigator Award by the American Academy of Dermatology for his research in novel therapeutics for sarcoidosis.

Jennifer M. Dan, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Jennifer M. Dan, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the Univeristy of California, San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Dan graduated from Boston University School of Medicine. She joined the physician-scientist traning program and completed her internal medicine residency and infectious disease fellowship at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She carried out her postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Shane Crotty at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) on the immunology of recurrent strep throat in children. She was awarded an NIH/NIAID K08 in 2018 and was subsequently appointed as a Clinical Associate at LJI. Her current research focuses on assessing immune responses in immunocompromised patients.

Adam David Durbin, MD, PhD

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Adam David Durbin, MD, PhD, received his BSc from York University, followed by his Medical degree and PhD at the University of Toronto. He performed residency training in the Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics and fellowship training in the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Boston Children’s Hospital Pediatric Hematology/Oncology fellowship. He performed post-doctoral research with Tom Look and Kim Stegmaier at DFCI and the Broad Institute studying the dependency landscape of high-risk pediatric solid tumors, including neuroblastoma and rhabdomyosarcoma. During this time, Dr. Durbin identified cohorts of reprogramming transcription factors responsible for establishing the malignant transcriptome in these high risk cancers. In 2020, Dr. Durbin was appointed to the faculty of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as an Assistant Member in the Division of Molecular Oncology, Department of Oncology and the Developmental Biology and Solid Tumor Program. Dr. Durbin’s laboratory seeks to understand how transcriptional regulatory circuitries establish malignant cell identity, and how these circuitries can be perturbed for clinical benefit using conventional and novel small molecules. Dr. Durbin has received numerous awards and grants from the National Institutes of Health, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, Forbeck Foundation, CureSearch for Children’s Cancer and the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Bishoy M. Faltas, MD

Weill Cornell Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Bishoy Morris Faltas, MD, is the Director of Bladder Cancer Research at the Englander Institute of Precision Medicine Institute at Weill-Cornell Medicine. He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Cell, and Developmental Biology. He is also the Gellert Family-John P. Leonard, MD Research Scholar in Hematology and Medical Oncology.

Dr. Faltas is a physician-scientist who focuses his research and clinical practice on urothelial carcinoma of the bladder and the upper urinary tract. His laboratory is dedicated to studying bladder cancer as a model disease for dissecting the fundamental biological mechanisms that drive the evolution of human cancers. Dr. Faltas has authored several peer-reviewed publications in high-impact journals, including Nature Genetics and Nature Communications. He has received several awards, including the ASCO Young Investigator Award and the AACR NextGen star award. Dr. Faltas received funding for his research program from multiple sources, including the Department of Defense, the NIH-funded MSK Bladder Cancer SPORE program, the Weill-Cornell CTSC, the STARR cancer consortium, and the P-1000 consortium. He is leading an investigator-initiated clinical trial examining the clonal evolution of bladder cancer following targeted therapy and serves as the translational science co-chair for several ongoing Phase II and Phase III clinical trials. He also served as an associate adviser for Science Translational Medicine and a member of the editorial board of several scientific journals, including Communications Biology and Bladder Cancer.

Lauren E. Ferrante, MD, MHS

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Lauren E. Ferrante, MD, MHS, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine) at the Yale School of Medicine and Director of the Operations Core at the Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. Her research program is centered at the interface of critical care medicine and geriatrics, with the overarching goal of understanding and improving the functional outcomes of critically ill older adults. Her work has demonstrated the importance of an older person's pre-ICU functional trajectory on post-ICU disability and mortality, identified novel factors associated with functional recovery after a critical illness, and demonstrated the importance of pre-ICU vulnerability factors across various domains with the functional outcomes of older ICU survivors. Among many ongoing projects, Dr. Ferrante is co-leading the NIA-funded VALIANT study (COVID-19 in Older Adults: a Longitudinal Assessment), a prospective study of older adults hospitalized with COVID that evaluates long-term outcomes in function, cognition, mental health, and freedom from burdensome symptoms. She is currently funded by a Paul B. Beeson Emerging Leaders in Aging Career Development Award, the Yale Pepper Center, and a COVID supplement from the National Institute on Aging.  

Dr. Ferrante trained in internal medicine at Columbia before moving to Yale for postdoctoral fellowship. At Yale, she concurrently completed a clinical fellowship in Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, a research fellowship in Geriatric Clinical Epidemiology, and a Master of Health Science degree before joining the Yale faculty. Dr. Ferrante’s research accomplishments have been recognized internationally, with the Global Rising Star Award from the Australia and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS, 2018), nationally, with the inaugural Arti Hurria Memorial Award for Emerging Investigators in the Subspecialties of Internal Medicine (American Geriatrics Society [AGS], 2019) and the 2021 Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year Award (AGS), and at Yale, with the Iva Dostanic Physician-Scientist Award.  Clinically, she is an attending physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

David B. Frank, MD, PhD

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

David B. Frank, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an attending physician in the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for his undergraduate studies, and he obtained his Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He completed his pediatrics residency and fellowship in pediatric cardiology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He performed a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Edward Morrisey at Penn. He has been awarded the Society for Pediatric Research Fellow Research award, Parker B. Francis Fellowship, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award, and a NHLBI K08 grant. 

Dr. Frank’s laboratory focuses on the mechanisms of cardiopulmonary development and regeneration. His research has uncovered mechanisms of alveolar epithelial cellular plasticity, a novel stem cell in the lung alveolus, and paradigms in early cell fate decisions in the lung alveolus. More recently, he is interested in mechanisms of development and regeneration of the pulmonary vasculature to discover and develop novel therapies for pulmonary hypertension in children.  

Lindsey A. George, MD

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

About the awardee

LIndsey A. George, MD, studies the molecular basis of coagulation that in diminished or excess functional states leads to disorders of hemostasis and thrombosis, respectively. Her lab is particularly interested in the intrinsic tenase enzyme complex that, in deficiency states, results in hemophilia A or B. The current primary focus of their work is the regulation of factor VIII cofactor function with the goal of exploiting biochemical understanding to develop gene based therapies for hemophilia A. Dr. George's lab is additionally interested in understanding the mechanistic basis of translational questions that have emerged from hemophilia gene therapy clinical trials. She was previously the lead clinical principal investigator of early phase hemophilia A and B adeno-associated virus-mediated gene addition trials. Lastly, Dr. George is the director of the Clinical In Vivo Gene Therapy at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia that long-term aims to safely and efficiently advance translational and clinical research for in vivo gene therapy for children with genetic disorders.

Marie A. Guerraty, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Marie Guerraty, MD, PhD, received a BS in Mathematics from Duke University and a MD and PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Guerraty then completed residency training in internal medicine and cardiovascular clinical and research fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania. She is now an Assistant Professor with a basic-translational research program focused on the coronary microvasculature and funded by NHLBI, WW Smith Charitable Trust, and Burroughs Wellcome Career Award for Medical Scientists. She uses interdisciplinary methods, including human genomics and deep phenotyping, translational mouse imaging and models, and traditional cell and molecular biology to understand the pathogenesis of coronary microvascular disease and develop novel therapeutic approaches.

Gunisha Kaur, MD, MA

Weill Cornell Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Gunisha Kaur, MD, MA, is an Assistant Professor of anesthesiology who specializes in human rights research. Dr. Kaur serves as the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, and a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has used her extensive training and research in neuroscience as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through scientific methodology. A foremost leader in scientific investigations into migrant health, her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research, and Cornell University. She earned her BS from Cornell University in 2006, MD from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010, and her MA in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 2015. 

Kara J. Mould, MD, MPH

National Jewish Health
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Kara J. Mould, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at National Jewish Health. She earned her medical and public health degrees from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL and completed Internal Medicine residency training at Emory University. She completed her fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Colorado. It was during this time that she joined the laboratory of Dr. William Janssen and began studying lung macrophages in murine models of acute lung injury. More recently, her research has focused on identifying transcriptionally-distinct airspace macrophage subsets during health and inflammatory lung diseases. To this end, she leads a translational study leveraging an endobronchial endotoxin challenge model in healthy research subjects. She hopes these projects will advance our understanding of the normal immune response to lung inflammation and eventually lead to novel therapeutic targets for patients with inflammatory lung diseases.

Ian Odell, MD, PhD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Ian Odell, MD, PhD, completed undergraduate education at Cornell University followed by MD and PhD degrees at the University of Vermont. He completed medical residency in dermatology and post-doctoral research under the mentorship of Richard Flavell, PhD, FRS at Yale University, where he was appointed to Assistant Professor in the department of dermatology. Dr. Odell's main research interests involve understanding the cellular processes that drive human fibrotic diseases and development of novel therapeutics. In his post-doctoral and young faculty work, Dr. Odell’s studies focused on translational and mouse experiments to understand how immune cells regulate the pathogenesis of fibrosis in patients with scleroderma. In his principal project, Dr. Odell identified a multicellular signaling circuit that is activated in scleroderma skin and lung fibrosis. Dr. Odell’s scientific expertise in scleroderma is paired by his clinical activities, where he has a dedicated outpatient fibrosis clinic, is the dermatology leader of the Yale Scleroderma Program, and helps direct the photopheresis unit that includes treatment of patients with scleroderma and chronic GvHD. 

Hasina Outtz Reed, MD, PhD

Weill Cornell Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Hasina Outtz Reed, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Weill Cornell. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her MD/PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Columbia University. Her clinical training in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care was done at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also conducted her postdoctoral research with Dr. Mark Kahn. In her lab at Weill Cornell, Dr. Outtz Reed studies the role of the pulmonary lymphatic vasculature in chronic lung disease and lung homeostasis. Dr. Outtz Reed has developed mouse models for studying impaired pulmonary lymphatic flow and has shown a direct connection between lymphatic dysfunction and lung injury. Ongoing work in her lab will investigate how underlying lymphatic dysfunction affects the lung’s response to injury and the mechanism by which this occurs. Her research is supported by funding from the NHLBI, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Manning Family Foundation.

Gregory Allen Payne, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Gregory Allen Payne, MD, PhD, received his undergraduate Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Yale University in 2005. He went on to complete his MD and PhD in cardiovascular physiology while completing the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Indiana University School of Medicine in 2011. Subsequently, Dr. Payne joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham ABIM Research Pathway in 2011 and has since completed residency and internal medicine and fellowship and cardiovascular disease. During his clinical training, he received numerous honors including recognition as the 2015-2016 chief cardiology fellow. As a graduate of both Medical Scientist and Physician-Scientist Training Programs, he has gained unique translational scientific skills to investigate vascular and cellular biology. As a physician-scientist, Dr. Payne’s career has been defined by his determination to understand the early mechanisms of vascular disease that ultimately lead to cardiovascular deaths. His translational research program investigates novel inflammatory signals generated by fragmentation of the vascular extracellular matrix. Since 2019, Dr. Payne has also helped co-direct the Translational Research Program for Complex Cardiopulmonary Diseases at UAB. He is also responsible for developing the next generation of physician-scientists as the Assistant Director of the UAB NIH-funded MSTP. Clinically, he cares for patients with a variety of common cardiovascular diseases including coronary artery disease. Dr. Payne has been a national member of the Early Career Committee for the American Heart Association’s (AHA) Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. He has championed the need for diversity in research through his involvement with the AHA-sponsored Supporting Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program as well as the UAB-sponsored DRIVEN initiative. Dr. Payne’s research has been nationally recognized, and he is one of two inaugural recipients of the American Heart Association-Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program (AHA-AMFDP) Career Development Award.

Michael Peters, MD, MAS

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

About the awardee

Michael Peters, MD, MAS, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He completed his undergraduate work at Emory University, Atlanta GA, and his medical school training at the State University of New York, at Stony Brook. He completed internal medicine residency at the University of Colorado and then his fellowship in Pulmonary/Critical Care UCSF where he also completed a Master’s Degree in Clinical Research. Dr. Peters is the recipient of a K23 award from the NIH NHLBI to investigate the pathobiological basis of severe asthma. His work has i) expanded understanding of type-2 high subtypes of asthma, ii) uncovered an important role of systemic IL-6 inflammation and insulin resistance as drivers of asthma severity and lung disease. Clinically, Dr. Peters is an attending physician in critical care medicine at the UCSF Medical Center, and has an outpatient practice focused on the care of patients with severe asthma.

Albert Powers, MD, PhD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Albert Powers, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale. He is also Director of the Powers Laboratory at Yale, and Medical and Associate Director of the Yale PRIME Psychosis Risk Clinic.  He studied Cognitive Science at Yale before moving to Nashville for Vanderbilt’s MD/PhD program, where he studied sensory neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Wallace. His graduate work focused on the process by which the brain combines information from the different senses and how that process changes with perceptual learning. He returned to Yale for psychiatry residency and began work with Dr. Philip Corlett, a junior faculty member whose prior work focused on predictive-coding-based models of delusion formation. Utilizing Al’s background in psychophysics and sensory neuroscience and Dr. Corlett’s background in predictive coding, they devised a study to test a predictive-coding model of hallucinations. The work that resulted, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin and Science in 2017, is the first evidence for a computational model that views hallucinations as an over-weighting of Bayesian priors during perception.

Dr. Powers joined the faculty at the Yale Department of Psychiatry in July 2018 as an Assistant Professor. His current work is funded by a K23 Career Development Award and an R21from the NIMH, a Career Award for Medical Scientists from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, and a fellowship from the Ludwig Family Foundation. Ongoing work in his laboratory leverages an emerging understanding of the perceptual underpinnings of hallucinations to begin to elaborate a fully-defined pathway of pathogenesis ending in symptom expression and the dysfunction that often accompanies it. In service of this goal, his group employs a wide variety of techniques to understand the symptoms of psychosis as they emerge, from neuroimaging to electrophysiology to computational modeling.

R. Grant Rowe, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

R. Grant Rowe, MD, PhD, focuses his research on the intersection of normal development and disease.  He completed his MD and PhD degrees at the University of Michigan, focused on matrix biology in the laboratory of Dr. Stephen J. Weiss.  After moving to Boston Children’s Hospital to further his medical training in a three-year categorical Pediatrics residency, he joined the laboratory of Dr. George Q. Daley, where his work focused hematopoietic development and modeling of blood diseases.  Dr. Rowe continued this work in Dr. Daley’s laboratory as his postdoctoral research as a Clinical Fellow and Instructor in Pediatric Hematology-Oncology.  In his independent research group, Dr. Rowe is leveraging his longstanding interest in developmental biology to study how the hematopoietic system and hematopoietic stem cells change over time during development and aging, which he believes provides opportunities to improve understanding and modeling of hematologic disorders, particularly those blood disorders biased toward onset in infancy and childhood.  Dr. Rowe's current efforts aim to translate lessons from normal development to build new models of human blood diseases with focus on the stem cell biology of normal and diseased hematopoiesis, particularly bone marrow failure (BMF) disorders and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS).  His lab focuses on developmental differences in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells and disease models positions us to apply these normal developmental paradigms to blood diseases that he sees in his clinical activities as a physician caring for pediatric BMF and hematopoietic stem cell transplant patients.  

Kristina E. Rudd, MD, MPH

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

About the awardee

Kristina E. Rudd, MD, MPH, is a pulmonary and critical care physician and clinical researcher in the Department of Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of the University of Washington School of Medicine, where she also completed her Internal Medicine residency and Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine fellowship training, T32 research fellowship, and MPH in Epidemiology. She is core faculty in the University of Pittsburgh’s Clinical Research, Investigation, and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness (CRISMA) Center. Dr. Rudd is currently funded on a NIGMS K23 career development award. Her research focuses on sepsis epidemiology from a global perspective, with a special expertise in resource-variable settings. Her research on sepsis epidemiology and on methods to identify sepsis patients has been published in JAMA and The Lancet. Her current work investigates the syndemic relationships between social and medical features that impact an individual’s risk for developing or dying from sepsis. She has particular interest in the impact of poverty, multimorbidity, and healthcare access and quality on sepsis incidence. Dr. Rudd also studies the clinical management of patients with sepsis, hemorrhage, acute kidney injury, traumatic brain injury, and other critical illnesses in resource-variable settings. She has collaborated on research in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Thailand.

José B. Sáenz, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

José B. Sáenz, MD, PhD, trained as a physician-scientist at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine where he learned to frame basic science questions in a broader clinical context. While his initial research interests were varied, he ultimately became drawn to microbial pathogenesis and the ability of bacteria to manage and exploit interactions with their hosts. Dr. Sáenz has recently been intrigued by the ability of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (Hp) to not only subvert its host but to establish a chronic infection and drive a reorganization of the human stomach that can lead to gastric cancer. His research program has focused on taking a multi-pronged approach to understanding the host-microbial interactions that drive pre-cancerous changes in the stomach. From the host perspective, Dr. Sáenz's lab has recently been investigating the response to double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) in gastric tumorigenesis, using newly developed in vivo and ex vivo models. From the pathogen perspective, his lab also studies how Hp transcriptionally adapts to alterations in the gastric landscape and how these microbial changes influence Hp pathogenesis and host immunity. Dr. Sáenz is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular Cell Biology at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and the Coordinator for the Digestive Diseases Research Core Conferences in the Division of Gastroenterology.

Carolyn Sangokoya, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Carolyn Sangokoya, MD, PhD, is an Instructor in the Department of Pathology at University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Sangokoya completed her medical and graduate training as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program at Duke University, where she discovered roles for microRNAs in oxidative stress and cellular iron homeostasis in the lab of Jen-Tsan Ashley Chi. At UCSF, she completed her post-graduate training in Anatomic Pathology, Surgical Pathology, and Gastrointestinal/Hepatobiliary Pathology through the Department of Pathology Physician-Scientist Pathway, and postdoctoral studies in stem cell and regenerative biology with Robert Blelloch at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, where she defined an axis of post-transcriptional control, endocytosis, and signal transduction essential for multiple aspects of stem cell biology.  Dr. Sangokoya is a recipient of the K08 Career Development Award from the NIH/NICHD to decipher post-transcriptional regulation of cell fate in early mammalian development.

As a physician-scientist and pathologist, Dr. Sangokoya’s clinical interests are primarily in liver pathology and advancing diagnostics for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). As a stem cell biologist, her basic science research interests are in dissecting the molecular networks that fine-tune the wiring and re-wiring of cell fates in stem-cell based models.

Nilay S. Shah, MD, MPH

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Nilay S. Shah, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Preventive Medicine and clinical cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute. He completed an MD and MPH from Northwestern University, an internship and residency in internal medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, a clinical cardiology fellowship and certificate in health equity and advocacy at the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University, and a postdoctoral research fellowship in cardiovascular epidemiology supported by an NIH/NHLBI F32 grant at Northwestern. His research program focuses on understanding the epidemiology and clinical implications of cardiometabolic health transitions and the development of cardiovascular diseases across the life course, with a vision to shift emphasis to primordial prevention of cardiovascular disease. He seeks to identify, adapt, implement, and scale effective cardiovascular disease prevention strategies, with particular focus on populations experiencing disparities, including Asian Americans and specifically South Asian Americans. He is the recipient of an NIH/NHLBI K23 grant to launch the MASALA-2G Study, an innovative offspring cohort to characterize cardiovascular health in young adult South Asian Americans. His work has been supported by NHLBI, NCATS, and the American Heart Association.

Teresa N. Sparks, MD, MAS

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

About the awardee

Teresa N. Sparks, MD, MAS, is a specialist in Maternal-Fetal Medicine and Clinical Genetics at UCSF, where she provides care for individuals whose pregnancies are complicated by a fetal anomaly, fetal genetic disease, maternal genetic disease, or other high risk complication. Her research program is focused on the application of genomic tests (such as exome sequencing, whole genome sequencing, RNA sequencing, and other functional studies) to understand the genomic contributions to non-immune hydrops fetalis. Ongoing research through this program will seek to elucidate genetic variants underlying fetal disease, characterize the unique fetal phenotypes of genetic diseases, and decrease disparities that exist in our current understanding of disease-causing variants across populations. Dr. Sparks' was recently appointed as a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator at UCSF, which will provide additional support to investigate novel treatments for genetic diseases identified in utero. Finally, her broader work is focused on prenatal phenotyping, characterizing the unique fetal features of genetic diseases, and understanding the impacts of maternal and fetal disease on pregnant individuals.

Bryan Sun, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Bryan Sun, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology at the University of California San Diego. He received his MD and PhD at Harvard Medical School with a research thesis focused on the biological roles of non-coding RNAs in the process of mammalian X-chromosome inactivation. He completed his residency in dermatology and post-doctoral training at Stanford University.

Dr. Sun is a practicing dermatologist and director of a genetic skin disease clinic where he cares for patients with neurofibromatosis, ichthyoses, cancer susceptibility syndromes, and other genetic skin disorders. His research laboratory focuses broadly on understanding genomic regulators that control skin development, with particular interest in functional elements of the non-protein coding genome that contribute to disease.

Eric R. Tkaczyk, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Eric R.Tkaczyk, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist with research interests in biophotonics for diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases. He is a graduate of the MD/PhD at the University of Michigan, with PhD in electrical engineering from the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS). At CUOS, he overlapped with his academic grandfather Gerard Mourou, the 2018 Nobel Laureate who founded the lab. Dr. Tkaczyk's post-doctoral training in medical device design at the University of Tartu was supported by Fulbright and Whitaker awards. This work culminated with a prize awarded by the US Ambassador to Estonia and the Estonian Speaker of Parliament at the 2011 Estonian-American Innovation Award ceremony. In 2016, he completed dermatology residency training at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he is Assistant Professor of Dermatology and Biomedical Engineering. He is also an attending dermatologist at the VA Medical Center. As founding Director of the Vanderbilt Dermatology Translational Research Clinic (VDTRC.org), he lectures internationally on dermatologic imaging technologies, which is his research focus. His research group develops artificial intelligence algorithms, imaging, and other technologies to provide skin-based assessments for personalized, evidence-based decisions within dermatology as well as in applications to systemic diseases with skin manifestations.

Neil Vasan, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Neil Vasan, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist who studies how kinases function in cancer cell signaling and therapeutic response, with a clinical focus on breast cancer. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, where he runs his own laboratory and sees breast cancer patients in the clinic. Neil earned his AB/AM in Chemistry at Harvard College and his MD/PhD at Yale University School of Medicine. He received his clinical training in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and in Medical Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he was a Chief Fellow, before joining the faculty at MSKCC from 2018-2021. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratories of the late José Baselga, Maurizio Scaltriti, and Lewis Cantley. His work has been published in Science and Nature and he has received grant funding from the NIH/NCI, Susan G. Komen Foundation, and ASCO. He is a recipient of the 2020 AACR NextGen Star award.

Silvia Vilarinho, MD, PhD

Yale School of Medicine
(affiliation at time of recognition)

About the awardee

Silvia Vilarinho, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist who uses genetics, genomics and human samples to investigate the molecular basis of various liver diseases of unknown etiology. Thus far, using these approaches, her lab has identified five novel genetic liver disorders. Their research goal is to continue to discover new genes important in liver function both in health and disease and to use cell biology and animal models to determine the specific mechanism(s) linking mutant gene to disease, with potential diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic applications. This research approach provides new liver biology knowledge with direct impact in improving patient care and creates a great scientific environment to train future physician-scientists and trainees with particular interest in human disease. Furthermore, they are also committed to make 'genomic medicine for liver disease' a reality in clinical practice worldwide. 

Srinivas R. Viswanathan, MD, PhD

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

About the awardee

Srinivas Viswanathan, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Viswanathan completed his undergraduate studies at Yale University and received his MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School, where his graduate training was in the lab of Dr. George Q. Daley. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital followed by a fellowship in Hematology/Oncology through the Dana-Farber/Mass General Brigham program. His postdoctoral research was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Broad Institute in the lab of Dr. Matthew Meyerson. His recognitions include the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, the Leon Reznick Memorial Price for Excellence in Research from Harvard Medical School, Young Investigator Awards from the American Society for Clinical Oncology and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, a Clinician-Scientist Development Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award. Dr. Viswanathan started his laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2019 and is focused on leveraging genomic and functional genetic technologies to dissect the mechanistic underpinnings and vulnerabilities of genitourinary cancers.