June 2024 Faculty Promotions

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

Associate Professor

Ayesha Abdeen, MD, Orthopaedic Surgery, specializes in total joint arthroplasty (TJA) of the hip and knee. Her clinical expertise includes minimally invasive primary TJA and complex revision TJA. Abdeen studies clinical outcomes research to investigate methods to improve post-operative pain, reduce infection rates and improve functional outcomes following TJA of the hip and knee. She is chief of the division of hip and knee arthroplasty at Boston Medical Center where she established a total joint replacement robotics program and a rapid recovery program for patients undergoing joint replacement. She has been appointed to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons committee to write questions for the national residency in-training examination and the Quality Measures Committee of the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons.

Nhan Do, MD, MS, Medicine, specializes in medical bioinformatics focused on effective development and delivery of knowledge tools in the clinical and research workflow. He is the director of the Boston VA Cooperative Studies Program Informatics Center, and he has been instrumental in developing the infrastructure to support research under a learning health system framework, including a large data repository, knowledge repository and software applications to deliver actionable knowledge. One of the informatics center’s projects focuses on improving the efficiency of and facilitating the screening and enrollment of veterans into clinical trials for investigators locally at VA Boston Healthcare System as well as nationally. Prior to joining BU and VA Boston, Do led the first personal health record for the military and the first health information exchange between the military and its civilian partners at a time when healthcare organizations were reluctant to share data outside of their boundaries. Do was also the first chief medical information officer to serve on the battlefield to evaluate the health outcomes of military tactics.

Kristen Goodell, MD, Family Medicine, is a clinician-educator whose work focuses on selecting and developing a diverse workforce of physicians and leaders in academic medicine. In addition to her work as associate dean of admissions for the MD Program, she has held multiple national leadership roles, including chairing the Leadership Task Force of the Council on Academic Family Medicine and the Council on Graduate Medical Education, and serving as treasurer of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine. Goodell has developed and run multiple clinical skills courses at various institutions and currently is a member of the school’s Academy of Medical Educators, where she provides longitudinal teaching, advising and coaching throughout the four-year MD curriculum. She also regularly supervises third-year MD students in outpatient family medicine as part of the family medicine clerkship. Goodell is the recipient of the department’s 2023 Medical Student Teacher of the Year.

Sarah Kimball, MD, Medicine/GIM, specializes in immigration-informed medical care, where she has helped to research and build health systems that are responsive to the needs of immigrant patients. She is the director of the Immigrant & Refugee Health Center at Boston Medical Center, a comprehensive medical home that addresses the barriers that immigrants face to being holistically healthy. Her studies of the critical health care needs of immigrant and refugee health populations have influenced national best practices. For her work in this field, she is known as a national expert in immigrant and refugee health, serving on the board of directors of the Society for Refugee Health Providers and as an associate editor for the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. In addition, Kimball has designed and taught a year-long curriculum for general internal medicine residents focusing on care for immigrant and refugee patients, for which she won a teaching award from the GIM residency office in 2022.

Clinical Associate Professor

Hannah Brown, MD, Psychiatry, has a longstanding dedication to caring for and improving the illness course for individuals with schizophrenia. She is the director of the Wellness and Recovery After Psychosis (WRAP) program at Boston Medical Center (BMC). Since arriving at BMC, Brown has expanded the WRAP program into a team of more than 20 people focused in areas of clinical care, training and clinical research. As part of the clinical care component, she built the multidisciplinary First Episode Psychosis program into a robust specialized program that sees one of the highest volumes of first-episode patients in Massachusetts. Under Brown’s leadership, WRAP has consistently been recognized at the state-level as a model program for specialized, evidenced-based accessible psychosis care. In addition to building the clinical program, she has built a research group focused on eliminating health disparities in psychosis care, both through clinical trials and accessing large data sets.