BUMC Faculty Appointments and Promotions – December 2022

Congratulations to the following Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine faculty on their recent appointment or promotion.

Professor

Anthony Griffiths, PhD, Microbiology, specializes in the field of the pathogenesis of emerging viruses. While much of his reputation was established by his studies of Filovirus disease, he also has made important and seminal contributions to our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses. He maintains a large research portfolio, most of which is performed under BSL-4 containment. His complex studies in animal models have earned him an international reputation as one of the leaders in the development, testing and translation of therapeutics and vaccines to serve the public’s health. Dr. Griffiths serves on the editorial board for the Journal of General Virology, and a number of advisory groups for the World Health Organization and the federal government, including the FANG (for filovirus expertise) and the A-Team (for alphavirus expertise).

Xinning “Tiger” Li, MD, Orthopaedic Surgery, specializes in sports medicine injuries focusing on complex shoulder and knee problems with both minimally invasive and open surgical techniques. He often cares for patients who have complex, long-standing problems and a high percentage of his cases are revisions. Dr. Li is a member of a small group of surgeons chosen by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) to develop national guidelines for rotator cuff disease. He was the AOA North American Traveling Fellow and the AOSSM-ESSKA traveling fellow. He is site PI for national and international trials, including the PCORI-funded ARC trial and the NIH-R01funded CuffGen study. He served as Chair for the AAOS ICL Sports Medicine committee and will be the Chair of the AAOS central ICL committee. Dr. Li is associate editor of the CME portion of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, sits on the editorial board of AJSM and reviews abstracts for multiple societies.

Gustavo Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD, Medicine/Gastroenterology and Microbiology, is a pioneer in nuclear reprogramming, establishing one of the first methodologies for the generation of induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC) and co-founder and co-director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) at BU, a world recognized stem cell institution. His laboratory has published seminal discoveries describing the mechanisms of nuclear reprogramming and their use in cell lineage specification and disease modeling. He received the BU Innovator of the Year Award in 2017 and is recognized for his open-source approach to science, having shared his reagents with more than 1000 laboratories worldwide. More recently, he reported the use of human iPSC for disease modeling of the gastrointestinal tract, establishing a novel platform for the generation of intestinal organoids and studying mechanisms of intestinal epithelial injury by SARS-CoV-2 as well as liver damage by Ebola Virus. His lab recently demonstrated a novel role for Notch signaling in the specification of the T-cell lineage specification of human iPSC. Dr. Mostoslavsky’s work has led to two BU patents, which were licensed and commercialized.

Megan Sandel, MD, MPH, Pediatrics, is a health services researcher who has built her career by researching, designing and implementing multi-level interventions to improve health of urban children and their families from historically disinvested communities. She began with a focus on the impact of the urban home environment on asthma and has extended to homelessness, housing and neighborhoods, evolving to policy-level advocacy and place-based interventions to address economic inequities. Dr. Sandel’s work has improved the health of urban, structurally marginalized children and families, and clarified our understanding of how poverty leads to health inequities in childhood asthma and the fundamental connection between child health and safe, decent affordable housing. She has defined interventions to address the social determinants of health, including using community health workers for asthma, screening for health-related social needs and using a medical-legal partnership to address legal needs, building the evidence base to scale these interventions nationally, and continues to innovate in place-based approaches to invest in the health of communities.

Clinical Associate Professor

Huihong Xu, MD, Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, is a general surgical pathologist and cytopathologist, with subspecialty expertise in genitourinary, gastrointestinal and thyroid pathology. Her recent research focuses on developing AI-assisted histology assessment of colon polyps for tumor diagnosis. Based at Boston VA Healthcare System West Roxbury Campus, Dr. Xu serves as associate chief for the pathology & laboratory medicine service. In addition, she is director of telepathology and director of anatomic pathology. Dr. Xu also teaches pathology courses at Chobanian & Avedisian SOM and serves on the Admissions Committee.