January 2024 Faculty Appointments and Promotions to Clinical Associate Professor
Congratulations to the following Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine faculty on their recent appointment or promotion.
Clinical Associate Professor
Laurence Brinckerhoff, MD, Surgery, is a minimally invasive thoracic surgeon who joined our community in 2022. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology/chemistry from the University of Vermont and his MD from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. He completed his internship and residency in general surgery at University of Virginia Health Sciences Center and a residency in cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Colorado Health System. Prior to joining BU/Boston Medical Center, Dr. Brinckerhoff was associate professor of surgery, chief of the division of general thoracic surgery and chair of the thoracic oncology program at Tufts University School of Medicine and Tufts Medical Center, Boston. A dedicated medical educator, he served as the director of the surgery clerkship at Tufts for 11 years and is the recipient of more than a dozen teaching awards.
Rachel Mott-Keis, MD, Family Medicine, completed her residency at Boston Medical Center over 20 years ago and has remained ever since, practicing primarily at East Boston Neighborhood Health Center (EBNHC). She spent a year volunteering at a transitional housing program for elderly homeless men, which helped shape and cement her interests in working with underserved populations. Her current focus is on immigrant health, in particular Hispanic and Latinx. She served on the Academy of Medical Educators from 2020-23 and has taught students in Introduction to Clinical Medicine 1 & 2 and precepted family medicine residents for almost 20 years. She led the development of EBNHC as a residency teaching site for the family medicine residency program and is the site director there.
Monica A. Pessina, PhD, MEd, OT (SAR’90, CAMED’05), Anatomy & Neurobiology, is a master educator in basic & clinical gross anatomy, histology and neuroscience at the medical school, the Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (GSDM) and in various BU graduate programs. Dr. Pessina’s research focuses on upper extremity motor function after stroke. Through this work, she developed a novel assessment tool for qualitative reporting of the trajectory of motor skill recovery following injury to the hand area of the motor cortex in a non-human primate model. Her clinical experience focuses on burn injury and upper extremity rehabilitation. She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including the Proctor & Gamble Outstanding Basic Sciences Faculty Award at GSDM in 2015 and 2020 and the dental school’s Spencer M. Frankl Award for Excellence in teaching in 2017.
Louis Toth, PhD, Anatomy & Neurobiology, is an innovative educator of graduate and medical students teaching a wide range of topics including histology, neuroscience, visual neurophysiology, endocrinology and reproduction. He published one of the seminal studies quantifying behaviorally relevant information coded by single parietal lobe neurons in Nature. Dr. Toth developed and directs the Cellular Organization of Tissues course and also directs graduate seminars on visual neuroscience and neural development for advanced PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. He serves on numerous committees, including the MD/PhD Admissions Committee, the Medical Education Committee, and the Electives Curriculum Subcommittee and for the past eight years has chaired the GMS Academic Policy Committee.
Eduard Vaynberg, MD (CAMED’00), Anesthesiology, specializes in interventional procedures for pain management of degenerative spine and joint conditions and complex regional pain syndrome with particular interest in spinal cord stimulation and radiofrequency ablations. His extensive clinical experience spans various medical settings across Massachusetts, including New England Baptist Hospital, Boston Surgical Suites, Hyde Park Pain Management Center and Boston Medical Center. He has served as residency rotation director of pain management since 2008 and was appointed the department’s director of pain management in 2019.