2022 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipients
Gail D’Onofrio, MD (MED’87), is the Albert E. Kent Professor of Emergency Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Public Health. She was the Inaugural Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine (EM) at the Yale School of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief of Emergency Services at Yale-New Haven Hospital Emergency Departments
Internationally known for her work in alcohol and other substance use disorders (SUDs) as well as her research on gender variations in women with ischemic heart disease, Dr. D’Onofrio has extensive experience as a leader, researcher, mentor and educator. Dr. D’Onofrio is an independent NIH-funded physician-scientist with over two decades of experience designing and implementing clinical trials in the ED setting related to alcohol and drug use. She is a Lead Investigator on a NIDA Clinical Trials Network (CTN) multi-site study, “Implementation of ED-Initiated Buprenorphine Validation Network Trial” (ED-INNOVATION) tests the implementation of ED-initiated buprenorphine in 30 diverse ED across the country and compares different formations of buprenorphine in engaging patients in treatment. Her work (JAMA, 2015) demonstrating that ED-initiated buprenorphine increases engagement in addiction treatment for individuals with OUD, has changed clinical practice, receiving multiple science awards, including awards from the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the Clinical Research Forum, the R. Brinkley Smithers and Distinguished Scientist Award by the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and most recently The American College of Emergency Physician’s Innovation & Excellence in Behavioral Health & Addiction.
Dr. D’Onofrio has a long track record of mentoring physician scientists in independent research careers. She is the PI of a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) K12 grant establishing the Yale Drug use, Addiction and HIV Research Scholars (Yale-DAHRS) program, a Mentored Career Development Program with focused training in prevention and treatment of drug use, addiction, and HIV in medical settings with scholars in Medicine, Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Pulmonary Critical Care. She has received several awards which reflect her dedication to mentorship and nurturing careers of junior investigators, including Excellence in Mentoring award from the Association for Medical Education and Research in Substance Abuse (AMERSA 2008), Advancing Women in Emergency Medicine award from the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM 2016) and the Academy for Women in Academic Emergency Medicine (AWAEM) Outstanding Department Award for the advancement of women (SAEM 2018).
Dr. D’Onofrio is the MPI of the New England Consortium Node, for the NIDA Clinical Trials Network. A founding Board member of the Board of Addiction Medicine recently recognized by ABMS as a Specialty, Sub-specialty. An advocate for individuals with SUD, she is one of the architects of Connecticut Governor’s Strategic Plan to Reduce Opioid Deaths, working with multiple agencies regionally and nationally to change policies and introduce interventions to combat the opioid crisis.
Daniel Rotrosen, MD, (MED’78), is the Director of the Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation (DAIT), one of three extramural program divisions at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The division’s mission spans fundamental immunology and translational and clinical research on protective immunity and immune-mediated diseases.
Through Dr. Rotrosen’s leadership, NIAID has greatly expanded knowledge of human immunology, systems vaccinology, and vaccine adjuvant discovery and development. DAIT supports a broad range of clinical trials and clinical trial consortia to develop and test novel treatment and prevention strategies. A long-term goal is the development of durable immunological tolerance for allergic and autoimmune disorders, and to prevent solid organ graft rejection. DAIT has a longstanding commitment to expanding knowledge of disease mechanisms and improving treatment options for children and adults from under-represented minorities.
Dr. Rotrosen has promoted development of transformative approaches for data transparency and public access. Two open-access data portals, ITN TrialShare and ImmPort, enable users to view and download participant-level clinical trial data and preclinical data sets. The division also supports a wide range of reagent resources, databases, and data visualization and informatics tools to facilitate immunology research.
Dr. Rotrosen graduated from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine in 1978. He completed internship, residency, and fellowship training at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. He was elected to membership in The American Society for Clinical Investigation, is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a member of The American Association of Immunologists and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. He has received numerous awards for scientific management and leadership, including two U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary’s Awards for Distinguished Service, the HHS Secretary’s Outstanding Team Performance Award, and the NIH Director’s Group Award.
Drew Weissman, MD, PhD (MED’87, GRS’87), is the inaugural Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. A longtime faculty member, he is a professor in the Department of Medicine, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, and director of vaccine research in the Division of Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Weissman is a physician-scientist and pioneer in the science of immunology whose decades of research enabled development of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines now being administered to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with Katalin Karikó, PhD, an adjunct professor of Neurosurgery at Perelman, he conducted groundbreaking research to identify the additional molecule, pseudouridine, that enables therapeutic use of messenger RNA (mRNA). Their discovery has far-reaching implications for potential treatment of infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders, cancers, and other debilitating conditions and won the 2021 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the nation’s top biomedical research award.
Dr. Weissman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biochemistry and enzymology from Brandeis University in 1981 and his M.D. and Ph.D. in immunology and microbiology in 1987 at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Following a residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, he took a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where he worked with Dr. Anthony Fauci, now chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden.
Dr. Weissman joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty as an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases in 1997. In 2005 he was promoted to associate professor, and in 2012 he became a full professor. His major contributions to the scientific field include the identification of the mechanism by which RNA activates the innate immune system and the discovery that naturally occurring modified nucleosides were the mechanism used by the cell to distinguish foreign RNA from self RNA. In 1998, he began collaborating with Karikó; in 2005, they published the seminal article, “Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors: the impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA;” and in 2006, they co-founded RNARx, a company dedicated to developing nucleoside-modified mRNA for therapy. Their patent on nucleoside-modified uridines of mRNA was the foundation for the vaccines that received FDA approval first for emergency use in late 2020 and subsequently for regular use in 2021.
Dr. Weissman’s work has resulted in the publication of more than two hundred papers, and he holds many patents, including those that describe the modifications required to make mRNA suitable for vaccines and other therapies. He and his lab team continue to conduct basic science research to understand and develop new nucleoside-modified mRNA platforms. For his transformative accomplishments as a researcher, he has received many accolades and honors, including the 50th Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Medical Science from Brandeis University (2020), the 2021 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, the 2022 Japan Prize, the Princess Asturias Award (2021), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2022). In 2021 he was named a TIME magazine Hero of the Year.