February 2022 Faculty Appointments, Promotions Announced
Congratulations to the following faculty on their recent appointment or promotion.
Professor
Sondra Crosby, MD, BUSM, Medicine/GIM and SPH, Health Law, Ethics and Human Rights, specializes in human rights, medical ethics, torture and refugee health. She has worked as a medical expert on torture for the Military Commissions Defense Organization (MCDO) and been an expert consultant on torture evaluation in countries around the world and to the U.S. Congress. She is co-founder of the Immigrant and Refugee Health Program in Primary Care at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and co-chair of BMC’s Immigrant Task Force. Crosby has made significant contributions to trauma documentation and providing care to refugees who have suffered human rights violations. Her scholarship has been fundamental to the development of the academic field of refugee health and human rights, and includes articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA on medical ethics and force-feeding, separation of families at the border, and prisoner abuse at Guantanamo and the CIA black sites.
Clinical Professor
Robert Eberhardt, MD, BUSM, Medicine/Cardiovascular Medicine and Surgery, directs the vascular medicine service and non-invasive vascular imaging laboratories at Boston Medical Center (BMC), positioned critically between medical and surgical service lines. He has served key roles on national credentialing and accrediting organizations involved in vascular medicine and vascular laboratory testing. His expertise is recognized in practice guidelines documents and clinical training standards. Eberhardt has mentored 12 fellows in vascular medicine, including many active in academic medicine, and trained numerous physicians in vascular diagnostic imaging. An attending on BMC’s inpatient vascular medicine consult service, cardiac intensive care unit and general cardiology inpatient services, he also supervises both cardiology fellows and internal medicine residents through his outpatient continuity clinics. He has been recognized annually as one of the best cardiovascular clinicians in Boston magazine’s Best Doctors since 2016. In addition, he lectures locally and nationally, and co-authored more than 70 articles and book chapters on vascular related topics.
Associate Professor
Jennifer Beane-Ebel, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Computational Biomedicine, applies computational methods to characterize molecular alterations associated with smoke exposure and lung disease. She has characterized the molecular and cellular response to chronic smoke exposure and smoking cessation in the airway field of injury and developed a clinicogenomic biomarker for early lung cancer detection. She also studies the molecular alterations associated with development and progression of bronchial premalignant lesions, precursors to lung squamous cell carcinoma and markers of increased lung cancer risk. She uses integrative analyses of genomic, spatial proteomic, and pathology imaging data to identify mechanisms of early immune suppression in premalignant lesions.
Francesca Seta, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Vascular Biology, focuses on the biology of vascular smooth muscle and its contribution to maladaptive vascular remodeling associated with arterial stiffness and aortic aneurysms/dissections, two vascular conditions with no current therapies. She has identified novel vascular smooth muscle-specific molecular mechanisms, which could be targeted therapeutically to prevent vascular diseases and established methods to assess arterial stiffness in experimental animals. Seta directed the BUMC Metabolic Phenotyping and IVIS Core since 2018 and has mentored undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs. She serves as an advisor for the MSc program in Bioresearch Core Technologies and on the admissions committees for MSc/PhD programs.
Kaku So-Armah, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/GIM, is an epidemiologist with expertise in analyses of cohort studies and use of electronic health record data for research. His lab uses data on health behaviors, risk factors and disease diagnoses coupled with molecular biology to identify and explain novel epidemiological associations and identify novel intervention targets. His research focuses on substance use and chronic infections like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and tuberculosis (TB) and how these exposures impact the heart, liver and lungs. So-Armah is committed to making his lab, GIM and BU leaders in inclusive excellence, such that all who work in these spaces can be who they are, rather than who they think they need to be to fit in.
Brian Yun, MD, MBA, MPH, BUSM, Emergency Medicine, is a clinical operations leader and expert in process improvements. Yun was recruited from Massachusetts General Hospital, where he developed and studied innovations in Emergency Department and hospital operations to improve throughput and capacity and reduce crowding. He also developed and implemented alternatives to admission programs to lower costs, increase hospital capacity and improve patient experience. These programs include the ED Observation Unit, Home Hospital program, and program to facilitate community hospital transfers.
Clinical Associate Professor
Lisa Caruso, MD, MPH, BUSM, Medicine/Geriatrics, specializes in improving care for older adults and developing innovative geriatrics clinical education models, particularly in dementia and diabetes in older adults. She received a Geriatric Academic Career Award in 2002 to study an older, underserved and frail population with diabetes and cardiovascular disease using evidence-based skills. She co-developed the Chief Resident Immersion Training Program in the Care of Older Adults, which has been disseminated nationally. She directs quality and patient safety for the Department of Medicine, to transform Boston Medical Center into an Age-Friendly Health System using the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 4M framework. Caruso also leads the Quality Improvement elective for the fourth-year medical students, and co-leads the yearly Quality Improvement and Patient Safety curriculum for internal medicine residents in their PGY1 and PGY2 years.
Frederic Little, MD, BUSM, Medicine/Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleep & Critical Care Medicine, studies airway inflammation in allergic asthma, and translational approaches to diagnostics of allergic disease. He was PI of a clinical study to develop a rapid saliva diagnostics platform to determine the causes of deterioration in asthma control. Little directs the Allergy/Immunology Fellowship Training Program and was medical director of the Pulmonary, Allergy and Sleep Clinics. He has directed several clinical care improvement initiatives including antibiotic stewardship and Boston Medical Center’s COPD Readmission Reduction Program and serves as an Allergy/Immunology subject matter expert for the CDC Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment program.