Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars
Each year, NAM selects up to 10 early- and mid-career professionals with demonstrated leadership and exceptional professional achievement in biomedical science, population health, health care and related fields to serve 3-year terms as ELHM Scholars.
While continuing to work at their primary institution, the ELHM Scholars will participate in certain NAM activities, exchange ideas with each other and field leaders across sectors and disciplines, receive mentoring from NAM members, and help shape the ELHM Program. Participants also provide valuable input and feedback to help shape the priorities of the NAM and sustain the NAM’s impact and reputation as a national leader in advancing knowledge and accelerating progress in science, medicine, policy, and health equity. ELHM Scholars may publish Perspectives, participate in convening activities throughout the larger National Academies, and participate in interest groups.
Selection Criteria
Selection of ELHM Scholars is based on a variety of factors, including personal and professional achievement, demonstrated creativity and field leadership, and the need for diverse perspectives and geographical and institutional representation. Qualified candidates will:
Have completed a terminal degree (or have equivalent experience and knowledge) in a relevant profession or field of study
Be early- to mid-career (defined generally as 5-15 years following attainment of the primary professional degree)
Demonstrate significant professional accomplishment and exceptional leadership potential
Be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident at the time of the application
Nomination Process
Visit our online nomination portal and click the NAM and NASEM Login button to log in using your NAM single sign-on credentials. Complete the form by providing the candidate’s contact information, your own statement of support, and the name of another individual who will write a letter supporting the candidate. The candidate and reference writer will receive an automated email inviting them to complete their portion of the nomination. Each member may nominate up to three candidates.
Current Scholars
Optional description copy
Optional secondary heading
Adewole (Ade) Adamson, MD, MPP, is a dermatologist and assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at Dell Medical School. His clinical interest is in caring for patients at high risk for melanoma of the skin, such as those with many moles or a personal and/or family history of melanoma. He is interested in how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to take care of this patient population.
His research involves understanding patterns of health care utilization including overuse and underuse. He is interested in how effectively and efficiently the health care system delivers care to patients with melanoma. He is passionate about health disparities, access to specialty care and costs. He speaks nationally about health care quality, value, and the application of evidence-based medicine within dermatology.
Adamson is a proud graduate of Morehouse College, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Biology and French. He earned a medical degree with honors at Harvard Medical School as part of the health sciences and technology program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in medical school he spent a year conducting research in immunology at the National Institutes of Health and later earned a Master in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School as a Zuckerman fellow in the Center for Public Leadership.
He completed his internship in internal medicine at The Mount Sinai Hospital followed by residency training in dermatology at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. After graduation, he spent three years on faculty at the UNC at Chapel Hill.
AZA Allsop, MD, PhD, serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Howard University Hospital. With an academic foundation in Biology, Philosophy, and Jazz Studies from North Carolina Central University, AZA deepened his exploration into social neuroscience in the Tye lab at MIT as part of the Harvard Medical School-MIT MD-PhD program. At the core of AZA’s research is the quest to understand how the brain processes social information, and its consequential effects on cognition and behavior. He believes that uncovering these mechanisms has the potential to redefine mental health treatments and provide deeper insights into societal behaviors. AZA also delves into the roles of music, mindfulness, and psychedelics in influencing social bonds and stress resilience. Leading his independent research lab, AZA champions studies on the social brain and alternative healing avenues, with a specific emphasis on supporting underserved communities. He also plays a pivotal role as the Director of the Center for Collective Healing at Howard University. Throughout his career, AZA has seamlessly merged academic rigor with initiatives that have tangible societal benefits, consistently pushing the frontiers of neuroscience and deepening our grasp of human interconnectivity.
Dr. Rima Arnaout is Associate Professor of Medicine, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator, and faculty in the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, the Biological and Medical Informatics program, and the Center for Intelligent Imaging at the UCSF. She is investigating whether machine learning can be used to detect standard and novel patterns in biomedical imaging in a scalable fashion, with the goals of decreasing diagnostic error in medical imaging and uncovering new phenotypes for precision medicine research. Dr. Arnaout completed her undergraduate degree at MIT, her MD at Harvard Medical School, residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cardiology fellowship at UCSF.
Dr. Arur established her laboratory in the Department of Genetics at MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2010. Over the last 12 years, her lab has built a strong foundation for understanding how female nutrition regulates reproduction and progeny survival and defined new molecular targets of cancer metastasis. Discoveries in the Arur Lab are primarily driven via federal, state, and private funds, in particular the National Institute for Health, American Cancer Society, Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, Anna Fuller Foundation among others. Dr. Arur obtained her Ph.D. with Prof. M.K. Bhan from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in India and conducted her postdoctoral work at Washington University School of Medicine with Prof. Tim Schedl. Dr. Arur serves on the Board of Directors at Genetics Society of America, she Chairs the Awards Committee for GSA, serves as a standing study section member of the NIH study section (CMIR); as an Editor at Development (published by Company of Biologists, UK). Dr. Arur is the co-chair and chair of the Gordon Research Conference in Developmental Biology in 2023 and 2025, respectively, (these are leading scientific meetings in the field). Dr. Arur was awarded the MD Anderson Presidential Scholar Award in 2017 and the Distinguished Faculty Mentor at MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2018. In 2020, Dr. Arur was Elected Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Sciences.
Peter Croughan is an Internist with a background in health policy and state-level administration, currently pursuing certification in Addiction Medicine. He was born and raised in rural Cajun Louisiana before heading to Yale University, where I majored in History of Science and Medicine. He then worked in health policy research at PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, before heading to UCSF for medical school, where I served as president of the student body. In 2017, Croughan took time away to work as Policy Director for Dr. Rebekah Gee and the Louisiana Department of Health, the state’s largest agency with over 5,600 employees and a $14 billion annual budget. There he spearheaded a statewide cancer strategy, analyzed state funding of graduate medical education, and developed the Hepatitis C subscription model. This new pharmaceutical payment model – the first in the US – allows unlimited access to Hep C medications, led to 12,425 cures to date, and serves as a model for the national elimination campaign launched this year. In 2018, Croughan assumed the role of Chief of Staff for the Department, where he was responsible for policy development, quality improvement, communications, external affairs, and legislative strategy. In 2020 Croughan returned to clinical practice at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is completing Internal Medicine – Primary Care training.
César de la Fuente is a Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads the Machine Biology Group. He is one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of Penn Medicine. He completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC).
His research goal is to use the power of machines to accelerate discoveries in biology and medicine. Notably, he pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models, demonstrating the application of AI for antibiotic discovery and helping launch this emerging field.
His lab is at the forefront of developing computational methods to mine the world’s biological information, leading to the identification of over a million new antimicrobial compounds. These efforts started by exploring the human proteome as a source of antibiotics for the first time. His team was also the first to find therapeutic molecules in extinct organisms, launching the field of molecular de-extinction. Molecular de-extinction has already yielded preclinical antibiotic candidates, such as neanderthalin, mammuthusin, and elephasin.
Furthermore, de la Fuente’s lab has broadened its antibiotic discovery initiatives to explore other branches of the tree of life beyond eukaryotes. By computationally analyzing microbial dark matter, his group has identified nearly one million new antibiotic molecules. These molecules have been made freely available and open access to the scientific community to encourage researchers worldwide to synthesize, characterize, and further develop them. This collaborative effort leveraged machine learning to explore the vast diversity of the microbial world by analyzing 63,410 metagenomes and 87,920 microbial genomes. Additionally, through the computational exploration of thousands of human microbiomes, de la Fuente and collaborators discovered a myriad of new antimicrobial agents, including prevotellin-2 produced by the gut microbe Prevotella copri.
Collectively, these efforts have dramatically accelerated antibiotic discovery, reducing the time required to identify preclinical candidates from years (longer than many PhD programs) to just a few hours. It is estimated that the work of de la Fuente and his collaborators have multiplied the speed of antibiotic discovery by a factor of 3.5 million, saving more than a million years of research and reducing what once took decades of collective work to just hours.
Additional advances from his lab include reprogramming venoms into antimicrobials, developing autonomous nanorobots to treat infections, creating novel resistance-proof antimicrobial materials, and inventing rapid, low-cost diagnostic devices for COVID-19 and other infections. Prof. de la Fuente is an NIH MIRA investigator and has received recognition and research funding from numerous organizations.
De la Fuente has received over 80 national and international awards. He is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), becoming one of the youngest ever to be inducted. He was recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s top innovators for “digitizing evolution to make better antibiotics.” He was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Langer Prize and as an ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry, an ASM Distinguished Lecturer, Waksman Foundation Lecturer, and received the Miklós Bondanszky Award, AIChE’s 35 Under 35 Award, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award, and the ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator Award. He also received the Thermo Fisher Award, as well as the EMBS Academic Early Career Achievement Award “For the pioneering development of novel antibiotics designed using principles from computation, engineering, and biology.”
Recently, Prof. de la Fuente has been awarded the prestigious Princess of Girona Prize, the ASM Award for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research, the ASM Award for Early Career Basic Research, the Rao Makineni Lectureship Award by the American Peptide Society, the Fleming Prize, and was selected as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine. De la Fuente serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals and is currently an Associate Editor of Drug Resistance Updates (IF= 24.3; the premier international drug resistance journal), Nature Communications Biology, Bioactive Materials (IF = 18.9), Bioengineering & Translational Medicine, and Digital Discovery. He has been named a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate multiple times.
Prof. de la Fuente has given over 300 invited lectures, including numerous Keynote and Named Lectures, and has also spoken at TEDx. He has co-authored an influential book on machine learning for drug discovery, secured multiple patents, and published over 170 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier journals such as Cell, Science, Cell Host Microbe, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, PNAS, ACS Nano, Nature Chemical Biology, and Advanced Materials.
Anwesha Dey is a Senior Director and Distinguished Scientist in the Discovery Oncology Department at Genentech. Prior to this position, she held postdoctoral research fellowships in the laboratory of Vishva Dixit at Genentech and at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), A*STAR, Singapore in the laboratory of Sir David Lane. She obtained her PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Summers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at UMBC, Maryland. Her scientific research at Genentech is focused on understanding the biology of Hippo and PI3K signaling pathways and how they can be targeted for cancer therapy. She has led drug discovery programs at Genentech and research from her lab has provided the foundation for developing first and best in class targets for therapeutic intervention. Dr. Dey has served as the co-chair of the AACR and FASEB meetings on the Hippo pathway — leading scientific meetings in the field. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the Keystone Symposia and is a recipient of the 2022 Genentech Women’s professional Emerging Leader Award, 2023 Changemaker of the year award at Genentech and 2023 Distinguished Alumni award recipient from University of Maryland. She is passionate about mentorship, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion and a significant contributor to Genentech’s efforts in this area.
Joseph Dieleman, PhD, is Associate Professor of Health Metric Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. He also leads the Resource Tracking research team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). This team has completed research focused on estimating healthcare spending by disease, tracking of development assistance for health and government health spending, projecting healthcare spending, and using novel methods to estimate healthcare value, cost of illness, and poverty rates at the subnational level. His projects are split between global research, seeking to understand financial flows for health in a wide variety of contexts, and US research, seeking to describe how healthcare is purchased. In both cases the goal is to provide information that is useful to policymakers and can contribute to improving health equity and outcomes, while maintaining or reducing inefficient spending. Dr. Dieleman received his PhD in Economics at the University of Washington.
Dustin T. Duncan, ScD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, where he directs Columbia’s Spatial Epidemiology Lab and co-directs the department’s Social and Spatial Epidemiology Unit. Dr. Duncan is a Social and Spatial Epidemiologist. His research broadly seeks to understand how social and contextual factors especially neighborhood characteristics influence population health, with a particular focus on HIV epidemiology and prevention and sleep epidemiology and promotion. Dr. Duncan’s intersectional research focuses on Black gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men and transgender women of color. His work appears in leading public health, epidemiology, medical, geography, criminology, demography, and psychology journals. Working in collaborations with scholars across the world, he has over 200 high-impact articles, book chapters and books, and his research has appeared in major media outlets including U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. Dr. Duncan’s recent work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the HIV Prevention Trials Network, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Verizon Foundation, and the Aetna Foundation. He has received several early career and distinguished scientific contribution awards including from the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS). In 2020, he received the Mentor of the Year Award from Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.
Ellen Eaton is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Director of the UAB 1917 HIV Clinic Outpatient-based Opioid Treatment Clinic. Her patient care and research is focused on infectious outcomes of substance use and mental health disorders. She studies low barrier interventions, such as patient reported outcomes, telehealth, and peer navigation, to improve diagnosis and treatment of addiction in the Deep South. She has recently extended her work to Zambia, another resource poor setting, to test low barrier therapies for substance use as a means to improve HIV outcomes.
Utibe R. Essien, MD, MPH is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and Associate Vice Chair of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Department of Medicine. He is a general internist at the Greater Los Angeles VA where he teaches medical students and residents and provides medical care to hospitalized patients. Dr. Essien is a proud New Yorker, earning his BA from New York University and MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. He trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. After residency he remained at MGH to complete an NIH-funded T32 general internal medicine research fellowship and received a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Essien’s research focuses on detecting, understanding, and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in the use of novel, evidence-based medications and technologies, particularly in the management of chronic cardiometabolic diseases such as atrial fibrillation. In 2021, he introduced the concept “pharmacoequity,” providing a new research and policy framework for achieving equitable access to life-saving therapies. He is an emerging leader in the field, as recognized by over 100 peer-reviewed publications and research grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the American Heart Association.
Dr. Essien’s leadership has earned him numerous awards including the 2023 Young Physician Scientist Award from the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the 2024 Society of General Internal Medicine Outstanding Junior Investigator of the Year Award, and election as a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. His research and writing has been featured in several national news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and NPR. He also serves as an Associate Editor for JAMA Network Open.
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, is the Founding Director of the Center for Cytokine Storm Treatment & Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the youngest faculty members to receive tenure in the history of the School of Medicine. Dr. Fajgenbaum is also the co-Founder & President of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, co-Founder & President of Every Cure, and national bestselling author of ‘Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action.‘ Dr. Fajgenbaum is also a patient battling a deadly disease which he discovered a repurposed treatment for that is saving his life and others. He has also advanced 18 other repurposed treatments for diseases they weren’t initially intended for. He recently co-founded Every Cure to unlock additional indications for FDA-approved medicines and is pioneering novel AI-driven approaches to enable this. In February 2024, ARPA-H awarded a $48.3M contract to advance Every Cure’s AI platform. Dr. Fajgenbaum also serves on the Board of Directors for the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA.
Elizabeth Cespedes Feliciano is a Research Scientist with the Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Northern California. She is an emerging leader in the science of how energy balance influences the outcomes of chronic diseases. Her work integrates informatics with molecular epidemiology to understand how body composition influences progression and survival in cancer and aging.
Dr. Feliciano’s novel findings have helped to move the field beyond body mass index as a measure of obesity to establish the importance of muscle mass and adipose tissue distribution in multiple clinical conditions, including surgical outcomes, treatment toxicity, and cancer survival. Her research is supported by multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health and foundations.
Dr. Feliciano earned her master of science in social and behavioral health and her doctorate in nutrition and epidemiology from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Holly Fernandez Lynch, JD, MBE, is Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, as well as assistant professor of law at Penn Carey Law School. She pursues conceptual and empirical research and scholarship with the goal of influencing institutional and governmental policy. Her work focuses on clinical research ethics and regulation, priority setting in research, access to investigational medicines outside clinical trials, FDA pharmaceutical policy, and the ethics of gatekeeping in health care.
Professor Fernandez Lynch is founder and co-chair of the Consortium to Advance Effective Research Ethics Oversight (www.AEREO.org), an organization working to evaluate and improve IRB quality and effectiveness, and an active member of the NYU Working Group on Compassionate Use and Preapproval Access (CUPA). She serves as a member of the boards of Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research (PRIM&R) and the American Society for Law, Medicine, and Ethics, and as “ethicist in residence” at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She was previously a member of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP).
Professor Fernandez Lynch has worked as an attorney in private practice, as a bioethicist serving NIH’s Division of AIDS, as an analyst with President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, and as executive director of Harvard Law School’s bioethics and health law research program. She was named a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in 2019 and elected a fellow of the Hastings Center in 2021.
Forum Kamdar is an advanced heart failure physician-scientist focused on advancing the care of patients with neuromuscular cardiomyopathies through clinical and translational research. She is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Cardiovascular Division and Lillehei Heart Institute at the University of Minnesota. She has spearheaded a multi-faceted approach to address major gaps in care and knowledge of the increasingly prevalent cardiomyopathy associated with neuromuscular disorders. She helped to develop a novel interdisciplinary program in Neuromuscular Cardiomyopathy, including a multi-specialty clinic to screen and treat cardiovascular involvement in adult muscular dystrophy patients. This has reduced the barriers to care for neuromuscular patients and addressed a gap in the clinical cardiovascular care for patients that have been highly underrepresented in cardiovascular care. She leads a multi-center network funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Association to understand outcomes advanced heart failure therapies in neuromuscular cardiomyopathy. Additionally, she developed and validated a Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) human stem cell cardiomyocyte model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy cardiomyopathy and identified major clinical gaps in care for patients with dystrophic cardiomyopathy. Her laboratory is elucidating fundamental mechanisms of DMD cardiomyopathy disease progression to identify novel therapies to ultimately treat DMD patients. Dr. Kamdar has received funding from national and international foundations as well as the federal government. For her outstanding contributions, Dr. Kamdar has received multiple awards including the American Society of Clinical Investigation Young Physician-Scientist Award, University of Minnesota Medical School Emerging Alumni Award, and American Heart Association Young Investigator Award.
Dr. Gunisha Kaur is a physician-scientist who has dedicated her career to advancing the health of forcibly displaced individuals such as refugees and asylum seekers. She has used her extensive background in neuroscience research as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights using scientific methodology. Her research has been supported by funders such as the National Institutes of Health, the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research, and Cornell University.
Dr. Kaur’s academic writing on forcibly displaced populations has been published by high impact medical journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. She has also translated her medical and scientific expertise in mainstream outlets including TIME, CNN, and NBC News. Dr. Kaur has given over 100 national and international keynote presentations and talks, including with global leaders, at the United Nations, and for the U.S. Government.
Dr. Kaur is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, and a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned her B.S. from Cornell University in 2006, graduated from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010, and completed her Anesthesiology Residency training at Weill Cornell Medical College/New York Presbyterian Hospital in 2014. She earned a Master’s Degree in Medical Anthropology from Harvard University in 2015.
As a member of Alaska’s Metlakatla Indian Community (Tsimshian), Jerreed is dedicated to health research for North American Indigenous (Alaska Native, American Indian, First Nations, and Native Hawaiian) populations. Dr. Ivanich is an Assistant Professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for American Indian Health. His work meets at the intersections of prevention science, social network analysis, and adolescent health to reduce substance use and suicide in tribal communities. Through community-based participatory research, Dr. Ivanich aims to take the knowledge and strengths of tribal communities and put them in dialogue with the broader research field to improve public health and advance scientific methods.
When Dr. Ivanich is not working, he loves spending time with his wife and two amazing daughters. They all enjoy skiing together in beautiful Colorado. As a solo hobby, Dr. Ivanich recently picked up triathlon training and racing and loves that this allows him to connect to nature while exercising. The activity that fills his spiritual cup is volunteering to teach an early morning church seminary class to local high school sophomore students three days a week.
Lucinda Leung is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. She is a general internal medicine physician at VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, who teaches medical students and residents, as well as cares for hospitalized and clinic patients. Dr. Leung was a first-generation college student who earned her A.B. at Dartmouth College, M.D. at Brown Medical School, M.P.H. at Harvard School of Public Health, and Ph.D. at UCLA School of Public Health. She completed fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation VA Clinical Scholars Program and was selected Chief Fellow for UCLA’s Specialty Training and Advanced Research Program. Dr. Leung is a board-certified Clinical Informatics subspecialist.
Dr. Leung’s expertise is in health services research to optimize care for primary care patients with mental health needs. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary team-based care models augmented by virtual care modalities. Poor mental health care access for her patients undermines her ability to successfully treat their medical conditions. Partnering with healthcare system leaders in the Veterans Health Administration and large health care organizations, Dr. Leung studies how to integrate mental health services into primary care practice (e.g., patient-centered medical home, collaborative care for depression, telemedicine), as well as its impact on care utilization, quality, and costs across populations, especially among safety-net patients. She and her research team employ wide-ranging methodologies (e.g., mixed methods research, implementation science cohort analyses, causal inference, pragmatic clinical trials) to understand how to redesign health services to help ensure the best outcomes at the highest value. She has been awarded more than 5 million dollars in federal funding (e.g., VA, National Institutes of Health), has published in leading peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA series), and has provided expert consultation to federal and state agencies (e.g., Government Accountability Office). Dr. Leung was recognized with the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System’s Research Impact Award in 2022 and with the Society of General Internal Medicine’s Excellence in Clinician Investigation in 2023, a top honor for early-career general internists in California/Hawaii.
Dr. Leung is supported by a VA Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D) Career Development Award to adapt and test primary care-based depression collaborative care models to increase uptake of effective digital mental health treatments for veterans. She recently obtained VA Merit funding to study potential disruption to depression care services during the COVID-19 pandemic, including downstream effects on psychiatric morbidity and mortality from suicide. Dr. Leung is also leading an NIH R01 that examines the effect of pandemic-related state policy changes surrounding telemedicine on patient-reported mental health care access, cost, symptoms, and functioning, with focus on Medicaid populations.
Dr. Molly McNairy is an internationally recognized physician scientist with over 15 years’ experience as a front-line doctor and public health researcher in global epidemics and health systems research. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell in the Center for Global Health and Division of General Internal Medicine and Chief of Hospital Medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. She directs the Weill Cornell Global Health Research Fellowship. She graduated from the University of North Carolina as a Morehead Scholar and received her medical doctorate from Harvard Medical School, with training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. During her medical training, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study health economics and policy at the London School of Economics and the London School of Tropical Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding modifiable poverty-related drivers of HIV and cardiovascular disease and applying this data to design targeted interventions for prevention and treatment. Her work includes epidemiologic cohort studies, clinical trials, and implementation science. She has been funded by the NIH (NIAID, NHLBI, Fogarty), CDC, and numerous other foundations. She has served as a technical advisor to Ministries of Health, WHO and CDC. She has received awards for her leadership and mentorship track-record, with a focus on women physician scientists. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children ages 6, 9 and 12.
Dr. Meredith Niles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and the Food Systems Program at the University of Vermont, and serves as the Associate Director of the Food Systems Research Center, a joint effort with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. Her interdisciplinary research in food systems, health and environment examines how to achieve sustainable food security along with the food and agriculture system pathways to improve health and environmental outcomes. Her research primarily focuses on the impact of climate change, disasters and other crises like pandemics on food security and health outcomes, as well as the drivers and barriers for farmers to adopt more sustainable management practices for climate change, water, and health outcomes. She is a founding member and director of the National Food Access and COVID research Team (NFACT), a consortium of researchers from 18 study sites in 15 states examining the impact of COVID-19 on food security and access. Her research has resulted in more than 75 peer-reviewed publications, 30 policy briefs and government reports, and garnered international recognition.
Dr. Niles holds a B.A in political science with honors in environmental studies from The Catholic University of America and a PhD in ecology with a focus on human ecology and environmental policy from the University of California- Davis. She was a Sustainability Science post-doctorate fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government exploring smallholder farmer experiences with climate change and food security in 15 countries. Prior to her academic career Dr. Niles worked at the United States Department of State on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and several environmental and food non-profits. She is passionate about making research more publicly available through open access, serving on the board of directors for the Public Library of Science (PLOS), one of the world’s largest non-profit academic publishers, from 2014-2022.
Dr. Akinyemi Oni-Orisan (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is a licensed pharmacist with practice experience in Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, cardiac stepdown, and outpatient (advanced dyslipidemia clinic) settings. He has board certifications in applied pharmacology from the American Board of Clinical Pharmacology and in clinical lipidology from the Accreditation Council of Clinical Lipidology. The long-term research goal of Dr. Oni-Orisan’s lab is to improve pharmacological regimens for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease in ancestrally diverse populations through precision medicine. To accomplish this objective, his group combines computational approaches in pharmacogenomics and pharmacoepidemiology using electronic health record-linked biorepositories. His lab is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate genetic determinants of efficacy and safety for statin therapy in diverse populations. Dr. Oni-Orisan serves as Diversity Leader for the Department of Clinical Pharmacy to champion diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism efforts in the department.
Dr. Oni-Orisan earned both his BS in biology (2006) and PharmD (2010) degrees at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences (2015) from the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the University of North Carolina. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Clinical Pharmacology Training Program (2017) at UCSF. Dr. Oni-Orisan then joined the faculty at UCSF in 2017. He received mentored early career training in research through an NIH Career Development Award (2018-2023) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
Cynthia Rogers, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis and Co-Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dr. Rogers graduated with a B.A. in psychology from Harvard University and completed her M.D., psychiatry residency, and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Washington University. She is an academic child psychiatrist whose program of research focuses on improving the psychiatric outcomes of infants through understanding the underlying neural mechanisms of social-emotional development and psychopathology and the impact of social determinants of health on these mechanisms. Dr. Rogers co-directs the Washington University Neonatal Development Research (WUNDER) group, a multidisciplinary lab which uses multimodal MRI to understand how poverty, racism, prematurity, and prenatal substance exposure affect the brain at birth, alter brain development across childhood, and relate to child psychiatric disorders. Dr. Rogers serves as prinicipal investigator of multiple NIMH and NIDA funded longtidinal research studies and serves as Associate Director of the Healthy Brain and Child Development national consortium study. Dr. Rogers clinical work centers on addressing the impact of social determnants of health to reduce development of psychiatric disorders in perinatal and child populations. She co-directs the Washington University Perinatal Behavioral Health Service which serves perinatal women with psychiatric and substance use disorders and she leads a teaching consultation clinic for formerly preterm children with early developmental and social-emotional delays. She serves on the editorial board of Biological Psychiatry and a Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and is a member of several professional societies, including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the FLUX Society, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
Benjamin N. Rome, MD, MPH is general internist and health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member in the Division of Pharmacology and Pharmacoeconomics in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Within the Division, Dr. Rome works within the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) to study the evaluation, regulation, cost, and use of prescription drugs in the United States. His research interests include how drug prices affect patient adherence and clinical outcomes, value-based drug pricing, and policies to make medications more affordable to patients. His work has been has published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Health Affairs, and JAMA Internal Medicine. His research has also been featured in a Congressional report about rising prescription drug prices and he has testified in front of the US House of Representatives about evidence-based drug approval during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Rome received his undergraduate degree in community health from Brown University, his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, and his Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health while he was a general internal medicine fellow at PORTAL. He trained in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is a practicing primary care physician at the Phyllis Jen Center for Primary Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Anita Shukla is the Elaine I. Savage Associate Professor of Engineering and core faculty member in the Center for Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. Professor Shukla’s research involves the development of nano- to macroscale responsive and targeted biomaterials for drug delivery, with a focus on treatment of bacterial and fungal infections. Professor Shukla is the recipient of several national and University honors and awards for both her research and teaching, including a National Academy of Engineering Grainger Grant (2021), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2019), a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2020), an Office of Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Grant (2017), and a Brown University Early Career Research Achievement Award (2020) and Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2017). She has mentored 12 Ph.D. students, 7 postdoctoral researchers, 12 Sc.M. students, and more than 45 undergraduate researchers. Her dedication to research and mentorship were recognized twice by a student body selected Tau Beta Pi Research Excellence Award (Rhode Island Alpha Chapter, 2019 and 2022). Prior to joining Brown in 2013, Professor Shukla was a National Institutes of Health Ruth Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University. She received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011 as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Professor Shukla also received an M.S. in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT. She received a B.S. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 with majors in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering.
Daniel J. Siegwart is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biochemistry, and the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He holds the W. Ray Wallace Distinguished Chair in Molecular Oncology Research and serves as the Director of the Program in Genetic Drug Engineering, Director of the Drug Delivery Program in Biomedical Engineering, and Co-leader of the Chemistry and Cancer Program in the NCI-designated SCCC. He received a BS in Biochemistry from Lehigh University (2003), and a PhD in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University (2008), studying with Professor Krzysztof Matyjaszewski. He also studied as an NSF EAPSI Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo with Professor Kazunori Kataoka (2006). He then completed an NIH NSRA Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT with Professor Daniel Anderson and Professor Robert Langer (2008-2012). Among various honors and awards, he has been elected to Controlled Release Society (CRS) College of Fellows and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. His research laboratory utilizes materials chemistry to enable targeted nanoparticle delivery of genomic medicines. Their efforts led to an understanding of the essential physical and chemical properties of synthetic carriers required for therapeutic delivery of siRNA, miRNA, tRNA, pDNA, mRNA, and gene editors. His lab has been at the forefront in the design of synthetic carriers for gene editing, reporting the first example of non-viral in vivo CRISPR/Cas gene editing, and has applied these technologies for correction of genetic diseases and treatment of cancer. He also developed Selective ORgan Targeting (SORT) lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for predictable tissue specific mRNA delivery and gene editing. Dr. Siegwart and his lab ultimately aspire to utilize chemistry and engineering to make a beneficial impact on human health.
Catherine Tcheandjieu, DVM, PhD, is Assistant Investigator at Gladstone Institutes and Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UC San Francisco since March, 2022. Born in Cameroon, her academic journey began with a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine from the National School of Veterinary Medicine of Algiers, Algeria, followed by a master’s degree in Public Health and PhD in Genetic Epidemiology from the University of Paris-Saclay, France. She continued her training in genetic epidemiology through postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and Palo Alto Veterans Administration, focusing on the genetics of cardiovascular disease utilizing the VA Million Veterans Program (MVP) and the UK Biobank cohorts. With expertise in epidemiology, genomics, and statistics, her research aims to unravel the complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors, with a focus on population diversity, genetic and environmental variability. Her research is now supported by an American Heart Association (AHA) Second Century Early faculty Independence Award. Her impactful contributions to science include co-authoring of over 35 publications, many in leading journals, and mentoring graduate, undergraduate, and postdoctoral trainees, including those underrepresented in science, fostering an inclusive academic environment. Beyond her scientific pursuits, Dr. Tcheandjieu is an advocate for equity, inclusivity, and representation, championing diversity, inclusivity and representation in both the academic workforce and her research. She has received various awards, including the French Higher School of Public health’s graduate student Award, the Stanford Postdoc Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Champion Award, the Stanford Jump Start Award, the MVP Early Career Investigator.
Hansel Tookes is a tenured Professor of Medicine at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He is founder of the IDEA Lab whose mission is to implement, disseminate, educate, and advocate for the health of people who use drugs. His lab also houses the IDEA syringe services program – the first legal program in Florida. Dr. Tookes spent five years advocating in the Florida Legislature for the creation of the program as an evidence-based HIV prevention intervention. In 2016, he succeeded and the pilot was signed into law. Today, Dr. Tookes serves as medical director of IDEA and successfully passed Infectious Disease Elimination Act of 2019 authorizing statewide expansion of syringe services programs. As a physician at Jackson Memorial, one of the largest public hospitals in the nation, Dr. Tookes attends on the HIV service as well as the Ryan White clinic. He is an advocate for health equity and has extensive experience working with both patients of low socioeconomic status and individuals who use drugs. His research interests include structural/systemic interventions and innovative approaches to HIV prevention and treatment. He is a 2021 recipient of a NIDA Avenir Award which is testing his innovative tele-harm reduction model for HIV treatment in a randomized controlled trial and, more recently, 3 NIDA R01s. The R01s include a trial of tele-harm reduction for the prevention of HIV, a team science cohort study, and an implementation science trial on opt-out HIV and hepatitis C testing for people who inject drugs. He has received numerous honors, including Miami Chamber of Commerce Healthcare Hero, Starbucks Upstander, and SAVE Champion of Equality. In 2023, he was appointed to the board of the HIV Medicine Association, the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and the CDC/HRSA Advisory Committee on HIV, Viral Hepatitis, and STD Prevention and Treatment.
Dr. Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. His current research program is focused on developing the next generation of drug delivery systems to enable safe and efficient delivery of therapeutics through the gastrointestinal tract as well developing novel ingestible electronic devices for sensing a broad array of physiologic and pathophysiologic parameters.
Dr. Gichoya is a multidisciplinary researcher, trained as both an informatician and an interventional radiologist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences of the Emory University School of Medicine and is seconded to the NIH as a DATA scholar to support the flagship DSI-Africa program building data science capacity in Africa. Dr Gichoya has active memberships in many national informatics and radiology societies and committees, and serves on the Board of Directors for SIIM and HL7. She co-chairs the SIIM Research Committee and the Medical Imaging and Resource Center (MIDRC) Bias and Diversity Working Group. At Emory, she is a member of the Emory University Artificial Intelligence for Humanity Advisory Group that supports the provost in recruiting prominent AI scholars to Emory, building a community of AI researchers, and training Emory students for future AI -driven work. She also serves on the Emory Science Gallery Atlanta Advisory Board, one of seven galleries in the world that combines science, art, technology, and design to deliver world-class educational experiences for young people. She is a member of multiple editorial boards including PLOS Digital Health, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) AI journal, and Radiology AI journal. She is a member of external advisory boards for large AI projects at Stanford University and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Dr Gichoya’s research is centered around three themes: curating diverse datasets for medical imaging, evaluating fairness and bias in algorithms, and validating AI in the real-world setting. She was recognized by her peers in 2021 as the Aunt Minnie Most Influential Radiology Researcher.
Alumni
Optional description copy
Optional secondary heading
Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, Associate Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor in Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, is an internationally-recognized vaccinologist and global health advocate. As Co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, she has more than two decades of experience in applying a product development partnership (PDP) model to build sustainable global biotechnology capacity and training programs that have successfully transitioned NTD vaccines from bench to clinic. Her philosophy is to engage, motivate and empower young scientists to build strong networks and contribute to scientific and global health effectiveness. As a global thought-leader she has received national and international highly regarded awards,has more than 120 scientific papers and participated in more than 200 conferences worldwide. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM), the Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement (Infectious Diseases) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Sr. Fellow of the American Leadership Forum (ALF). Currently, she is also a committee member to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for the Stronger Food and Drug Regulatory Systems Abroad consensus study. Dr. Bottazzi has a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and Clinical Chemistry from the National Autonomous University in Honduras, and a doctorate in Molecular Immunology and Experimental Pathology from the University of Florida. Her post-doctoral training in Cellular Biology was completed at University of Miami and Pennsylvania.
Deidra C. Crews is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Associate Vice Chair for Diversity and Inclusion of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is a Core Faculty member of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research, and is affiliated with the Hopkins Center to Eliminate Cardiovascular Health Disparities and the Hopkins Center on Aging and Health. Dr. Crews’ core area of research addresses disparities in the care and outcomes of chronic kidney disease. She has examined the contribution of social determinants of health, including poverty and access to healthful foods, to disparities in kidney disease. Her work in end-stage renal disease includes studies of the optimal timing and setting of dialysis initiation among vulnerable groups, and patient preparation for the start of renal replacement therapy. Dr. Crews was the inaugural Gilbert S. Omenn Anniversary Fellow of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine). She is Chair of the American Society of Nephrology Chronic Kidney Disease Advisory Group and a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Chronic Kidney Disease Surveillance Team. She has more than 45 peer-reviewed published manuscripts, and serves on the editorial boards of BMC Nephrology and Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease.
Adaeze Enekwechi is the President of Impaq, LLC and its subsidiaries including Impaq International, Maher and Maher, and ASCEND. She provides strategic oversight of all research, technical assistance, and technology services across all program areas including healthcare, workforce development, social programs, education, and international development.
Most recently, Dr. Enekwechi was a Vice President at McDermott+Consulting, and before that served as the Associate Director for Health Programs at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Barack Obama. As the federal government’s chief health care budget official, she provided budget, policy, management, and regulatory oversight for over $1 trillion in spending on a range of federal programs including Medicare, Medicaid, insurance marketplaces, the CMS Innovation Center, and for a number of agencies including CMS, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the OMB, Dr. Enekwechi managed the review and approval of major CMMI reform proposals, as well as MACRA/Quality Payment Program rulemaking. She also managed OMB processes for reviewing several FDA policies, Medicaid negotiations, Zika and other public health funding requests. Dr. Enekwechi is highly experienced with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) implementation, playing a key role in driving ACA budget, policy, strategy and operational coordination with various agencies, including the Department of Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Office of Personnel Management, among others.
Dr. Enekwechi was previously a Managing Consultant at the Lewin Group where she specialized in health policy evaluation, Medicare and Medicaid payment policies, and quality measurement. She also worked at the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, and the Congressional Budget Office. Dr. Enekwechi completed a BA at the University of Iowa, an MPP at the American University, and a PhD in Health Services and Policy from the University of Iowa. Her research area focused on the use of long-term care services among older adults. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago, School of Medicine. Dr. Enekwechi is also a Research Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, and a Visiting Professor at Meharry Medical College.
Dr. Fayanju is an Assistant Professor of Surgery and (effective July 1, 2019) of Population Health Sciences in the Duke University School of Medicine, Associate Director for Disparities & Value in Healthcare with Duke Forge, Surgical Lead for the Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) clinic in the Duke Cancer Institute, and Director of the Durham VA Breast Clinic. She received both her undergraduate degree in History and Science and an MA in Comparative Literature from Harvard. She received her MD and a master of population health sciences (MPHS) from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also completed her residency in General Surgery. She completed fellowship training in Breast Surgical Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
She is an academic breast surgeon who conducts health services research focused on addressing disparities in breast cancer outcome and treatment, optimizing management of aggressive breast cancer variants such as IBC, and enhancing the quality and efficiency of breast cancer care delivery using the principles of value-based health care.
In 2017, Fayanju was awarded a Duke CTSA KL2 Career Development Award (CDA) to support her research, and she is the 2019 recipient of the American College of Surgeons/American Society of Breast Surgeons Health Policy And Management Scholarship. Her work has previously been recognized with receipt of two Conquer Cancer Merit Awards from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and has been published in a variety of journals including Annals of Surgery, Annals of Surgical Oncology, Cancer, and JAMA Surgery.
Lori Freedman, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her research is housed within Advancing New Standards In Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), a program of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Dr. Freedman was a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics and currently co-directs the Research Consortium on Religious Healthcare Institutions, a joint program between UCSF and the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Davis. Her research investigates the ways in which reproductive health care is shaped by our social structure and medical culture. Her book, Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care, is a qualitative study about abortion and physician practice. Currently, her research focuses on intersection of religion and health care, especially in the case of Catholic-owned hospitals. She studies the implications of religious policies for patient autonomy, and how conscience-based rights are employed by institutions to circumscribe reproductive care.
Christopher Friese is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing, where he focuses on measuring and improving the quality of cancer care delivery. He is also a faculty investigator at the university’s Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, a faculty member of the Cancer Surveillance, Outcomes and Research Team, and a core member of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. He has practiced as a staff nurse at leading cancer centers, including the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the University of Michigan Health System. Dr. Friese is a national expert in the analyses of claims data to study care quality and has executed large surveys of ambulatory oncology nurses. The author of 54 peer-reviewed publications, his research findings were among the first to establish a significant relationship between favorable nurse practice environments and lower surgical mortality.
As the first nurse scientist to complete a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from the National Institute of Nursing Research, Dr. Friese leads an interdisciplinary research program to study the quality of care delivered in understudied ambulatory oncology settings from the perspectives of patients and clinicians. He has also led pivotal studies to develop a valid and reliable measure of ambulatory nursing work environments. His recent work looks for patterns and correlates of hazardous drug exposure in oncology nurses. Dr. Friese directs the DEFENS (Drug Exposure Feedback and Education for Nurses’ Safety) Study on nurses’ use of personal protective equipment when handling chemotherapy and leads a National Cancer Institute–funded study on individualized decision making and treatment for breast cancer in an era of precision medicine.
Dr. Friese received a BSN-PhD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and completed a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship in Cancer Control and Outcomes at Harvard University/Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is a member of the American Academy of Nursing and received the University of Michigan’s Henry Russel Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty, the first nursing school recipient in the award’s 90-year history.
Jordan J. Green is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Oncology, Ophthalmology, Neurosurgery, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Materials Science & Engineering, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also an associate researcher of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology and co-founder and associate director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at JHU. Dr. Green received his B.S. in biomedical engineering and in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 and completed his PhD in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. Subsequently, Dr. Green was a postdoctoral associate at MIT in chemical engineering from 2007-2008. Dr. Green is also the CTO and co-founder of the Baltimore biotech startup company, AsclepiX Therapeutics and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. His work has resulted in the publication of over 90 papers and he has received numerous awards including the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Allan Colburn Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society Rita Schaffer Award, the American Society for Gene & Cell Therapy Outstanding New Investigator Award, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Young Investigator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and was named by Popular Science as one of the “Brilliant Ten.” Dr. Green’s main research interests are in creating biomaterials and nanobiotechnology to engineer cells and develop advanced therapeutics.
Marcia C. Haigis obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 2002. She performed postdoctoral studies at MIT studying mitochondrial sirtuins and metabolism. In 2006, Dr. Haigis joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Cell Biology. Dr. Haigis is an active member of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging and the Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School. Her research aims to: 1) identify molecular mechanisms by which mitochondria respond to cellular stress and 2) elucidate how these cellular mechanisms contribute to aging and age-related diseases, such as cancer. The Haigis lab has made key contributions to our understanding of metabolic reprogramming in cancer, including a role for prolyl hydroxylase 3 in the control of fat oxidation in leukemia and metabolic recycling of ammonia to generate amino acids important for tumor growth. Dr. Haigis has received a Brookdale Leadership in Aging Award, the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar Award and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award.
Sandeep Kishore is Associate Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health. He is the President & Founder of the Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network (YP-CDN), a global non-profit of 5000 young professionals from over 140 countries committed to the equitable prevention and treatment of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as a social justice issue. In this capacity, he served as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 2011, speaker in 2014 and delivered a TED talk at TEDMED 2012 on new approaches to global chronic disease.
He has worked to amend the World Health Organization’s Essential Medicines List with 9 medications–including for heart disease and cancers–which facilitates access to low-cost medicines for free or the cheapest prices possible. He has served as an Advisor to the WHO Global Coordination Mechanism on NCDs regarding expansion of access to low-cost tools globally.
He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, where his dissertation focused on the evolution of malaria parasitism in humans. His discoveries led him to win the national Raymond W. Sarber award for most outstanding graduate student in microbiology. His work on both innovation + access to health goods has been featured in the popular press (Scientific American, The Huffington Post, National Public Radio and The Scientist), as well as in scholarly journals including JAMA, Health Affairs, The Lancet, the Nature Reviews series and PLoS Medicine. He is on the Medical Review Board of The Huffington Post, the Editorial Advisory Board of TEDMED and is a member of the Forum on Health Professional Education at the Institute of Medicine. He is a graduate of Duke University (B.S.) and Oxford University (M.Sc.), and is the first The Lancet awardee for community service. He completed his MD and PhD degrees at Weill Cornell.
Mark D. Neuman is Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Dr. Neuman is the founding Director of the Penn Center for Perioperative Outcomes Research and Transformation, which focuses on improving the health and well-being of patients undergoing surgery, critical care, and pain treatment through comparative effectiveness research and implementation science. A practicing general anesthesiologist and health services researcher, his work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research. Dr. Neuman’s work, which has appeared in JAMA, the Lancet, the BMJ, and the New England Journal of Medicine, focuses primarily on understanding the determinants of functional outcomes among older adults undergoing major surgical procedures and the short- and long-term consequences of anesthetic and pain management interventions delivered around the time of surgery; additional work has examined processes by which medical research findings are translated into expert guidelines, and how such guidelines change over time in response to new evidence. He is the Principal Investigator of the PCORI-funded REGAIN trial (Regional versus General Anesthesia for Promoting Independence after Hip Fracture), a 45-center international pragmatic randomized trial to assess the association between commonly used anesthesia treatments for older adults undergoing hip fracture repair with and survival and functional outcomes at up to 1 year after fracture. Dr. Neuman currently chairs the Committee on Geriatric Anesthesia of the American Society of Anesthesiologists and lectures nationally and internationally on the care of older adults undergoing surgery and anesthesia and on the design and conduct of pragmatic trials in perioperative care.
Minal Patel is the John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Health Behavior & Health Education (HBHE) at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She completed her MPH and PhD in HBHE at the University of Michigan. Broadly, Dr. Patel’s program of research focuses on optimizing the management and prevention of common chronic diseases through a) identification of factors that influence poor behavioral and health outcomes at multiple levels of influence, and b) the development and evaluation of behavioral interventions in disparity populations to improve outcomes. A particular emphasis of her work is access to care, health care navigation, and health-related financial toxicity. Dr. Patel has led studies focused on improving health insurance literacy in economically disadvantaged communities, screening and addressing social determinants of health in clinical settings, health care provider training in implementing guideline-based care. Dr. Patel’s work is primarily situated in in a broad range of health care and health care delivery settings. Her work has been funded through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health, and private foundations. In 2017, Dr. Patel received the Early Career Achievement award from the Behavioral Sciences and Health Services Research Assembly of the American Thoracic Society.
Suchi Saria is the John C. Malone Assistant Professor of computer science, statistics and health policy and the Director of the Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is also the founding Research Director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at Hopkins. Her research focuses on developing next generation diagnostic and treatment planning tools that leverage statistical methods to individualize care. Towards this, her methodological work focuses on questions such as: How can we combine different sources of information with prior knowledge to derive actionable inferences? How can we characterize and improve reliability of the resulting inferences in challenging real- world settings? How can we support decision-making in safety-critical domains? Her work has received recognition in numerous forms including best paper awards at machine learning, informatics, and medical venues, a Rambus Fellowship (2004-2010), an NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship (2011), selection by IEEE Intelligent Systems to Artificial Intelligence’s “10 to Watch” (2015), the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2016), MIT Technology Review’s ‘35 Innovators under 35’ (2017), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), and the World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (2018). In 2017, her work was among four research contributions presented by Dr. France Córdova, Director of the National Science Foundation to Congress’ Commerce, Justice Science Appropriations Committee. Saria joined Hopkins in 2012. Prior to that, she received her PhD from Stanford University working with Prof. Daphne Koller.
Gretchen Schwarze is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Surgery and Medical History and Bioethics. She received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She completed residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Her fellowship training in vascular surgery and clinical ethics was done at the University of Chicago Hospital and Clinics. She is a practicing vascular surgeon and health services researcher who also directs the clinical ethics curriculum for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Her research interests are in patient-doctor decision making for high risk operations and end-of-life care. She is an alumna of the Greenwall Faculty Scholars program and was an Anniversary Fellow at the IOM in 2010. She is now funded by the NIH (NIA) and PCORI to test interventions to improve patient-doctor communication. She also receives funding from the National Palliative Care Research Center and the Greenwall Foundation.
Julie Segre received her BA summa cum laude in mathematics from Amherst College, where she now serves on the board of trustees. She received her PhD in 1996 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Eric Lander, PhD, and the newly formed genome center. Dr. Segre then performed postdoctoral training with Elaine Fuchs, Ph.D., an expert in skin biology, at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Segre joined the National Human Genome Research Institute of NIH in 2000 and was promoted to a senior investigator with tenure in 2007. Dr. Segre’s laboratory utilizes high-throughput sequencing and develops algorithms to study the microbial diversity of human skin in both health and disease states, with a focus on eczema and other microbial-associated infections. Dr. Segre published the first topographical maps of human skin bacterial and fungal diversity. Dr. Segre’s laboratory also develops genomic tools to track hospital-acquired infections of multi-drug resistant organisms, including the NIH’s recent Klebsiella pneumoniae outbreak.
Dr. Segre’s research is based on active collaborations with the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center and the clinical departments of Infection Control, Microbiology, and Dermatology. Dr. Segre is a leader in the NIH Roadmap Human Microbiome Project, communicating with multiple media sources to promote the concept of humans as ecological landscapes. Together with the NIH epidemiologist, Tara Palmore, MD, Segre received the 2013 Service to America Medal, considered among the most prestigious for a federal employee, for their work to establish the clinical utility of microbial genomics.
Jacob S. Sherkow is a Professor of Law at the Innovation Center for Law and Technology, New York Law School. His research focuses on the intersection of advanced biotechnologies and intellectual property and regulation. Prof. Sherkow is the author of over 30 articles on these and related topics in both traditional law reviews and scientific journals, including Science, Nature, the Yale Law Journal, and the Stanford Law Review. He is also the winner of the 2018 Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award and the Class of 2017 Teaching Award. On matters pertaining to biotechnology and patent law, Professor Sherkow has advised both the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and a committee of France’s National Assembly. Aside from his appointment at New York Law School, Professor Sherkow is a Permanent Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law and a community member of the New York Genome Center. Previously, Professor Sherkow has held research positions at Stanford Law School and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Professor Sherkow graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was an editor of the Michigan Law Review. He also holds an MA in biotechnology from Columbia University and a BSc from McGill University in molecular biology.
Hanni Stoklosa is the Executive Director of HEAL Trafficking, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with appointments at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. She is Director of the Global Women’s Health Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Connors Center. Dr. Stoklosa is an internationally-recognized expert, advocate, researcher, and speaker on the wellbeing of trafficking survivors in the U.S. and internationally through a public health lens. She has advised the United Nations, International Organization for Migration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of State, and the National Academy of Medicine on issues of human trafficking and testified as an expert witness multiple times before the U.S. Congress. Moreover, she has conducted research on trafficking and persons facing the most significant social, economic, and health challenges in a diversity of settings including Australia, China, Egypt, Guatemala, India, Liberia, Nepal, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, South Sudan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Among other accolades, Dr. Stoklosa has most recently been honored with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Women’s Health Emerging Leader award and the Harvard Medical School Dean’s Faculty Community Service award for her tireless efforts to advance the public health response to trafficking. Her anti-trafficking work has been featured by the New York Times, National Public Radio, Glamour, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, STAT News, and Marketplace. Dr. Stoklosa published the first textbook addressing the public health response to trafficking, “Human Trafficking Is a Public Health Issue, A Paradigm Expansion in the United States.”
Dr. Y. Claire Wang is Vice President for Research, Evaluation, and Policy at the Academy. In this role, she is responsible for promoting the climate for excellent research, strengthening the research infrastructure, and fostering collaborations among the Academy’s researchers and external partners. Dr. Wang is trained as a physician epidemiologist with expertise in decision sciences, chronic disease prevention, and public health policy. Prior to joining the Academy, she was Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. During her tenure at Columbia, she served as the faculty director of the MPH certificate in Comparative Effectiveness and Outcomes Research and as co-director of the Obesity Prevention Initiative, a cross-disciplinary team focusing on environmental and policy approaches to preventing obesity at the community level. She also taught decision analysis and economic evaluation of health technologies, and mentored numerous graduate students and clinical scientists. She obtained her medical degree from National Taiwan University, as well as a MS in Epidemiology and ScD in Health Policy and Decision Sciences from Harvard Chan School of Public Health. She was elected Fellow of The New York Academy of Medicine in 2013.
Jonathan H. Watanabe is an associate professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of California San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and is the National Academy of Medicine Anniversary Pharmacy Fellow 2016-18 supported by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the American College of Clinical Pharmacy. He was a contributor to the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Ensuring Patient Access to Affordable Medications study and report. Dr. Watanabe examines large, real-world data with the goal of developing policy solutions to improve patient care, augment population health, and reduce medical costs. Watanabe focuses on improving access to evidence-driven medication use and pharmacist-directed patient care. He serves as an advisor to the California Health Benefits Review Program for the California State Legislature. He is an investigator, faculty, and fellowship director for the federal Health Resources and Services Administration funded San Diego Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program and is also supported by the NIH National Institute on Aging to examine high-risk medication use and costs in older adults. Dr. Watanabe was the inaugural recipient of the University of Washington/Allergan Global Health Economics and Outcomes Research Fellowship. Professor Watanabe is a clinical consultant at the St. Paul’s Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) Clinic in San Diego, CA and the Villa Pomerado Skilled Nursing Facility in Poway, CA. He received his BS from the University of Washington. Watanabe completed his doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) at the University of Southern California. He received an MS and PhD from the University of Washington Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute. He is a Board Certified Geriatric Pharmacist (BCGP).
Joseph C. Wu is the Simon H. Stertzer, MD Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Radiology, and the Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute. Dr. Wu received his medical degree from Yale. He completed his medicine internship, residency and cardiology fellowship training at UCLA followed by a PhD (Molecular & Medical Pharmacology) in the UCLA STAR program. Dr. Wu has received several awards, including the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Career Award in Medical Sciences, BWF Innovation in Regulatory Science Award, Baxter Foundation Faculty Scholar Award, American Heart Association Innovative Research Award, AHA Established Investigator Award, National Institute of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, NIH Roadmap Transformative Award, and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers given out by President Obama. He is on the editorial board of Journal Clinical Investigation, Circulation Research, Circulation Cardiovascular Imaging, JACC Cardiovascular Imaging, Human Gene Therapy, Molecular Therapy, Stem Cell Research, and Journal of Nuclear Cardiology. Dr. Wu is is a Council Member for the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and a Scientific Advisory Board Member for the Keystone Symposia. He is also a member of the Association of University Cardiologists (AUC) and Association of American Physicians (AAP). His clinical activities involve adult congenital heart disease and cardiovascular imaging. His lab research focuses on stem cell biology, drug discovery, personalized medicine, and molecular imaging.
Ramnik Xavier, an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is also Chief of Gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Kurt Isselbacher Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the director of Center for Microbiome informatics and therapeutics, MIT. As a clinical gastroenterologist and molecular biologist, he studies the specific molecular mechanisms involved in innate and adaptive immunity as well as the genetic variants associated with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and autoimmunity. His laboratory uses genetic, structural, computational, and animal models, as well as clinical research to define the mechanisms controlling inflammation and immunity in vivo. Dr. Xavier is seeking a better understanding of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, based on the soaring number of genes now known to be implicated in the two immune-related disorders. His lab has translated an unprecedented number of genes to function, and Xavier has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers over the course of his career.
Through a transformative collaboration with the Broad’s Chemical Biology Platform, the Xavier laboratory aims to discover small molecules that can correct pathways defective in Crohn’s and autoimmunity. Xavier and his colleagues have made progress in identifying small molecules in the autophagy pathway (Crohn’s), and small molecules that control cytokine function and regulatory T cells.
In his role as Chief of Gastroenterology at MGH, which he assumed in 2010, Xavier oversees one of the only comprehensive, multidisciplinary programs in New England dedicated to diagnosing, treating, and managing patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Xavier was elected to the American Association of Physicians in 2011and is also a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology. Dr. Xavier received his MB, ChB from the University of Zimbabwe and completed his residency and fellowship at MGH.
