BUSM Faculty Promotions to Associate Professor Announced

The following BUSM faculty have been promoted to the rank of associate professor:

Headshot of Dr. Adolphe.Soukaina Adolphe, Pediatrics, is co-medical director of the GROW clinic, in the division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics as well as the founder and director of the EASE clinic, which serves families of children with special education needs, many of whom are not English-speaking. She administers the Diagnostic test to make the diagnosis of autism in the first three years of life. An avid educator of medical students during their pediatric clerkship, she is an innovator and mentor to students and other members of her patient care teams.

Headshot of Dr. Berger-Greenstein.Jori A. Berger-Greenstein, Psychiatry, is a behavioral medicine psychologist, core faculty member in the BU Mental Health Counseling and Behavioral Medicine Program, and a staff psychologist in the Adult Behavioral Health Psychiatry Clinic at Boston Medical Center. She has developed expertise in field of ethics and training mental health providers in ethics and ethical decision-making. Dr. Berger-Greenstein constructed an innovative model for teaching ethics, which she has presented at American Counseling Association and Association for Counselor Education and Supervision conferences. She also recently completed a fellowship in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. In addition, she is a member of the BMC Ethics Committee and the Ethics Consult Team, conducting consults with her colleagues on ethical dilemmas throughout the hospital.

Headshot of Dr. Broder-FingertSarabeth Broder-Fingert, Pediatrics, is a leader in the field of autism services research. Primarily funded by NIMH, her work seeks to improve access to services for urban children at risk for autism; she serves as a PI on multiple R01 awards from NIMH – leading a national effort to understand long-term outcomes of children with autism detected through a set of innovative service system delivery programs; testing optimization strategies for Family Navigation; and developing implementation strategies for autism treatments in Early Intervention. Dr Broder-Fingert also is a leader within the Department; she has served as a member of the Intern Selection Committee at the Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) in Pediatrics since 2015. She also is a member of the BCRP Council and the Residency Program Training Council, and is a leader in the hospital-wide autism friendly initiative to improve the medical experience for individuals with autism. Nationally, she is a founding member of the NIMH Autism Spectrum Disorder PEDS Network, a founding member of the NIMH-funded RISE Research Network, a member of NIMH study section, and is a core member of the HRSA Healthy Weight Research Network.

Headshot of Dr. Field.Thomas Field, Psychiatry, holds the honor of authoring the first two books published on the topic of neuroscience integration into counseling practice by the American Counseling Association, which remain the only two books published by the ACA on this topic. An outstanding educator, in the three years he has worked at BUSM, he has trained and supervised more than 100 BU mental health counseling interns as well as mentored 14 students. He was co-PI and is current PI on a SAMSHA grant to train counseling students in substance use disorder assessment and treatment. He serves on the standards revision committee of the national accreditation body for counseling, the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP). He is associate editor of the Journal of Mental Health Counseling, and co-editor of the neurocounseling section of  Counseling Today. He has served as chair of the Neuroscience Interest Network since 2015, and Chair of the Neuroscience Taskforce since 2018, both within the American Mental Health Counselors Association.

Headshot of Dr. Fuchs.Cara Fuchs, Psychiatry, is a clinical psychologist who serves as vice chair, chief of psychology and director of Integrated Behavioral Health. She also has served as co-director of the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology. Her work focuses on identifying ways of improving equity in access to and engagement with behavioral health services through innovative approaches to integration in primary care and other medical settings. She has developed behavioral health screening workflows and implemented evidence-based behavioral health services in primary care. She regularly presents locally and nationally on the topic of Integrated Behavioral Health to multidisciplinary audiences.

Headshot of Dr. Flynn.Rachel Flynn, Pharmacology and Medicine, focuses on DNA damage repair and mechanisms of telomere maintenance in cancer.  Her research has led to the identification of genetic mutations that contribute to the activation of the alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT) pathway and facilitated the development of small molecule inhibitors that target ALT positive cancers. A proponent of university-wide cancer initiatives, Dr. Flynn organized a seminar series showcasing BU research to unify interdisciplinary cancer researchers and foster collaborations within the university. Supported by funds to bring in outside speakers, the series has grown into a cancer community series uniting basic and clinical scientists. In April 2019, Dr. Flynn was appointed Co-Director of the Genome Science Institute to expand genetics and genomics research within the Cancer Center community.

Headshot of Dr. HadlandScott Hadland, Pediatrics, is known for his work in adolescent health and substance use. Dr. Hadland’s clinical and research interests focus on youth substance use disorder prevention and treatment. As part of these efforts, he seeks to improve education on addiction to pediatricians in the US and beyond. Dr. Hadland has also studied the potential influence of the pharmaceutical industry in physician prescribing of opioids and stimulants. He is one of a only small number of clinicians in the United States with triple-board certification in General Pediatrics, Adolescent Medicine, and Addiction Medicine. Dr. Hadland is a member of the editorial board for Pediatrics. He was the 2020 recipient of the Emerging Leader Award in Adolescent Health from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the 2020 recipient of the New Investigator/Educator Award from the Association for Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance use and Addiction. He was named to the Boston Combined Residency Program Teaching Honor Role (an honor given to only three faculty members each year).

Headshot of Dr. KimTheresa Kim, Medicine/GIM, focuses on clinical addiction care, chronic disease management and homelessness. She developed and implemented a novel, at the time, educational innovation – an Addiction Medicine Elective and was its co-director from 2007 to 2011. She developed the curriculum and structure of the elective including bedside observation of student interviews with hospitalized patients with substance use, case discussions, and lectures. Dr. Kim is co-investigator and core faculty in the BUSM Evidence-based SBIRT Student Training Project (BESST), funded by SAMHSA. In addition, she was selected to co-lead the BUSM Substance Use and Prescription Drug Misuse Vertical Integration Group to update the school’s addiction medicine curriculum.

Headshot of Dr. LabunskyyVyacheslav Labunskyy, Dermatology, focuses on studying the molecular and genetic mechanisms underlying the aging process, with the goal of using this knowledge to develop novel therapeutic approaches for age-related diseases. His work utilizes a systems biology approach combining novel sequencing and live-cell imaging methods to pursue quantitative analysis of the factors that lead to or accompany aging in living organisms. Dr. Labunskyy has been supported by major NIH and AFAR grants and published a book and numerous articles in top scientific journals.

Headshot of Dr. LalNidhi Kumar Lal, Family Medicine, focuses on underserved populations and full-spectrum family medicine. Her interests include teaching, advocacy, narrative medicine and global health. As a Fulbright specialist consultant in India, she has worked on developing the telemedicine aspect of the Piramal Swasthya Maternal Child health program for tribal populations. Currently serving as chair of the Minority Affairs Section at Massachusetts Medical Society, their work has initiated and forwarded several measures that focus on diversity and inclusion in medicine. Her clinical services and academics have been recognized through the Massachusetts Medical Society Community Clinician of the Year Award in 2017 and Women’s Health Award in 2019. In addition, Dr. Lal runs a podcast called Musings by Nidhi, which shares her experiences as a physician.

Headshot of Dr. Long.Michelle Long, Medicine/Gastroenterology, is a physician-scientist with an expertise in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Director of the NAFLD Research Center and director of clinical research for the Section of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, her clinical and research interests center on the relationship between NAFLD and cardiovascular disease. She conducts patient-oriented research investigating fibrosis and inflammation in patients with NAFLD and imaging and risk stratification strategies for hepatic fibrosis. Dr. Long is the PI of projects evaluating the prevalence and risk factors for liver fat (steatosis) and fibrosis and investigating the clinical and genetic correlates of hepatic steatosis and fibrosis as measured by transient elastography. Dr. Long receives research funding from multiple sources, including the NIH (NIDDK), Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Gilead Sciences, Echosens Corporation, and Boston University.

Headshot of Dr. McPheeJames T. McPhee, Vascular Surgery, has been focused on surgical comparative outcomes research since his two-year dedicated research fellowship during his general surgery residency where he co-founded a surgical outcomes research group at UMass Medical School. Through advanced degree work at the Harvard School of Public Health he has furthered his research knowledge base that has allowed him to mentor students, residents and fellows and engage them in comparative effectiveness research techniques and writing. He leads the open surgical techniques section of the fourth-year medical students’ surgical bootcamp, and is site supervisor at VA Boston for the third-year students’ vascular surgical rotation. Additionally, he was recently promoted to the VA Boston Associate Chief of Surgery for Quality and Safety.

Headshot of Dr. MeibomSara Meibom, Radiology, is a nuclear medicine imaging specialist who interprets general nuclear, nuclear cardiology and PET/CT hybrid imaging and has helped grow the range of provided imaging including new PET agents for the detection of neuroendocrine tumors and micrometastasis prostate cancer, as well as growing the therapeutic service providing Y90 Sirspheres, Radium 223, and 177 Lu-DOTATATE therapies to cancer patients in conjunction with their oncologists. She has a special interest in head and neck cancer imaging. She teaches nuclear medicine to medical students, radiology residents and cardiology fellows. In addition to serving as the nuclear medicine expert at multidisciplinary tumor boards, she collaborates on multiple clinical research projects including those related to head and neck cancer, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s disease and frostbite

Headshot of Dr. Mitchell.Karen Mitchell, Psychiatry, is recognized for her work in eating disorders, including her investigations of comorbid trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder and eating disorders in male and female veterans. Her work has helped to build a foundation for the Veterans Healthcare Administration’s (VHA) current efforts to train provider teams in VA medical centers across the country in the treatment of eating disorders. Prior to Dr. Mitchell’s appointment at VA Boston Healthcare, there were very few published investigations of eating disorders in veteran samples. In the past nine years, she has published numerous papers on this topic, including findings from studies on the prevalence of eating disorders in male and female veterans, the impact of childhood, adulthood and military trauma on eating disorders, associations between intimate partner violence and eating disorders in male and female veterans, sexual orientation and eating disorders in male veterans, and associations between PTSD and eating disorders in military and veteran samples.

Headshot of Dr. NavaltaCarryl P. Navalta, PhD, Psychiatry, specializes in child clinical psychology with expertise in behavior therapy and cognitive behavior therapy. He has been a core faculty member in the Mental Health Counseling & Behavioral Medicine (MHCBM) Program since 2012. His particular clinical and research interest focuses on developmental adversity as a prominent risk factor for the onset of various health conditions. He has taught the course, Psychological Trauma Across The Lifespan, for several years for his MHCBM students. Already adept in exposure-based interventions due to his cognitive behavior therapy background, he later became an expert in a science-based treatment model for the behavioral health consequences of developmental adversity, Trauma Systems Therapy (TST), which was created at BMC/BUSM. He has consulted with clinical teams nationwide on TST. Most recently, he was a member of a research team for a multisite field trial to validate the proposed diagnosis, Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD), and consulted with an assessment team on the DTD diagnosis for participants in a randomized controlled trial of a trauma-focused treatment, Attachment, Regulation, and Competency (ARC).

Headshot of Dr. NedeljkovicZoran Nedeljkovic, Medicine/Cardiology, is an interventional cardiologist and director of the Interventional Cardiology Fellowship Program responsible for trainee education in the invasive cardiology laboratory. He has mentored, or co-mentored, 30 trainees in interventional cardiology and approximately 85 general cardiology fellows in basic cardiac catheterization competencies. Within the BUSM cardiovascular diseases course and cardiology teaching curriculum, He has participated in 19 different clinical trials, many of which proved to be practice-changing (including COURAGE, BARI-2D, and DAPT). He has been a 10+-year member of the BMC Multi-disciplinary STEMI Working Group, and also served on the Massachusetts Chapter of the American College of Cardiology (MA-ACC) Quality Oversight Committee.

Headshot of Dr. SteinThor Stein, Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, is a neuropathologist who focuses on understanding the role of age, trauma and genetics on the development of multiple types of neurodegenerative disease. His research includes the most comprehensive studies to date on beta-amyloid deposition, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, and Lewy body disease following repetitive mild traumatic brain injury. He is associate director of the Neuropathology Core for BU Alzheimer’s Disease & CTE Center and a site PI and neuropathologist for a number of brain biorepositories, including the Framingham Heart Study, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) National ALS Biorepository, and the VA ALS Biorepository and Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses Biorepository. Since 2012, Dr. Stein has served the Federal Government on the VA ALS Biorepository Tissue Access Committee, Department of Veterans Affairs Central Office. He is PI on numerous grants, including a VA Merit Award on the role of traumatic brain injury in the development of AD and CTE as well as multiple NIH grants focused on determining the link between epigenetic modifications, lipidomic profiles, and pathological changes in the brain as they relate to cognitive decline.

Headshot of Dr. UpadhyayUrvashi Upadhyay, Neurosurgery, is a skull base neurosurgeon who brings expertise in accessing and treating brain tumors, including those at the base of the brain through endoscopic and transcranial approaches. She also has a rich career in translational research in the treatment of brain tumors, which began when she was a medical student at Johns Hopkins, continued through her residency and has persisted through her time at BUSM. The focus of her work has been development of drug delivery devices that can be implanted intracranially in a tumor bed to circumvent the need for chemotherapies to cross the blood brain barrier. She is now expanding the scope of diseases that can be treated by these implantable devices in collaboration with the McGovern Institute at MIT, examining drug delivery to small deep cerebral nuclei in small volumes to treat movement disorders. She currently serves as the Neurosurgery Residency Site Director.

Headshot of Dr. Schuser WachenJennifer Schuster Wachen, Psychiatry, focuses on improving evidence-based cognitive-behavioral treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veteran and military populations, with a secondary interest in physical health and functioning outcomes. She has been integrally involved in the first randomized clinical trials of PTSD treatment in active duty military through collaboration with the STRONG STAR Consortium, a large national consortium linking prominent investigators in the field of PTSD research, which has had significant implications for the delivery of evidence-based psychotherapies within the Department of Defense (DoD). She has been continually funded by the DoD and serves as Co-I on several VA-funded PTSD treatment studies. She is a trainer and consultant in Cognitive Processing Therapy, and also is known for her work in the area of moral injury, conducting an invited workshop at the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies conference, and leading an invited chapter on the topic published by the American Psychological Association.

Headshot of Dr. WasanSharmeel Kaur Wasan, Medicine/Gastroenterology, is an expert in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a champion on the importance of healthcare maintenance in these medically complex patients and the gastroenterology fellowship program director. Her research concentrates on improving healthcare maintenance of the IBD patient by focusing on vaccination strategy and her practical guide to vaccinating IBD patients sparked major interest in the field and her seminal review on the topic has been cited 195 times.

 

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